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Could the stalker now know where she lived and no longer need to ride the streets?
And conversely, wasn’t that the exact same scenario for someone trying to track him?
It might even make more sense.
Nutsbe also parked his car in the garage. And per Iniqqus regulations, he consistently traded his vehicle once a week. The motorcycles wouldn’t have found his vehicle either.
Did that thought process even work?
Why would the motorcycles buzz the streets if they could figure out with a court docket search that Olivia would be at the federal courthouse for the last week?
Whose name was newly listed with the court? His.
Could an AI program, say from an enemy nation or a self-preserving counterintelligence chief, have searched him out? They didn’t catch him at the police station but could have watched him leave the courthouse. And shot at him. Then tracked him when they failed.
Who put the pod in place, and who were they trying to track?
Data was what Nutsbe needed.
And data was what he was good at.
***
Sitting at his desk, his computer humming, Nutsbe searched backward along the route that ended in the ambush. The images at the last camera showed two riders and their motorcycles. He searched for Mickey Pauley in the Department of Motor Vehicles database. The make and model didn’t line up. Neither did either of the silhouettes. He did another search for the Offsed brothers’ names and images with the police department. Olivia said they were out on parole. He didn’t think those men were the ones on the bikes behind them. He looked up their vehicle registrations anyway, and those bikes didn’t line up either.
This looked like a dead end.
Still, their riding behavior wasn’t normal. If they had thought Nutsbe’s driving was erratic, it would have been easier and better to just buzz on around his vehicle and get ahead of him.
He worked backward. The first cameras that he crossed in his vehicle also showed those motorcycles.
But what happened to them after the ambush?
Nutsbe pulled up the cameras on the other side of the road at the correct time and located the two men riding side by side. Their license plates were covered over. Nutsbe followed the bikes along a route back to where he’d first picked them up. Out for a drive and called it a day after witnessing an ambush? He’d know soon enough.
They continued to the first camera that had registered Nutsbe’s vehicle on his way to Iniquus. Instead of moving forward to where another camera would pick up their route, one of the men held out his arm, signaling a left turn.
That put them back at the parking lot where Olivia had left her car.
They would have had all the time they needed at that point if they wanted to place the tracker.
Nutsbe’s phone wouldn’t have received any kind of warning message because his phone wasn’t associated with that car.
Were they trying to track him?
Track Olivia?
It didn’t matter.
Connecting the dots trying to form a coherent picture, the bikers might have placed the tracker after the ambush when they could no longer follow Nutsbe or Olivia to their destination.
No matter whom they were trying to track, the pod had an end destination last night.
And the motorcycles weren’t buzzing the neighborhood last night.
That was enough for Nutsbe to snatch his phone up to call Olivia.
But her phone was in sleep mode.