…”the hard drive with everything he knows about you. And tell him the police have a copy.”
I stood in that driveway reading the page twice. My daughter’s school. My wife’s name. Things I’d never told a customer.
“He reads my email,” she said quietly. “When I booked your company, he looked you up within an hour. That page came off his printer last night. He’s done this to everyone who’s ever tried to help me. My sister. A friend from church. They always back off once he shows up with a page like that.”
She took a deep breath. “So I took the hard drive from his office this morning. Every page he’s ever made about anyone. I gave it to a detective an hour before you got here. Her card’s in the box. I wanted you to have something to hand him, instead of being afraid of him.”
I called my wife from the truck. Then I called the detective on the card. Her name was Simmons. She already had my name. She said the drive had files on eleven people, and she wanted to talk to every one of them, starting with me.
That afternoon, I drove to my daughter’s school and spoke with the principal myself. I gave her a photo of him. She thanked me and put it on the front desk.
He came to my office the following Thursday. Polite, in a pressed shirt, holding a folder. He asked, very calmly, where my crew had taken his wife’s things. I didn’t say a word. I just handed him the page.
He read the line at the bottom. All the color left his face. Then he turned around and walked out, and two officers met him in my parking lot. He’d violated the protective order she’d filed that morning just by coming near the people on that drive.
I never found out where the blue boxes went. That was the whole point. But a month later, an envelope came to my office with no return address. Inside was a photo of a little kitchen, with blue boxes stacked in the corner, half unpacked, and a note: “Thank you for loading them first.”
