“You go do that,” Greyson said quietly.
As she watched, he pulled out the guy’s wallet.
She frowned. “What are you doing?”
“Once the cops get here, they won’t tell us anything,” he said. “I want to know who this guy is.” He flipped the wallet open to the driver’s license, pulled it out, as well as several credit cards, and took photos.
“Why the credit cards?” She hated that tone of suspicion in her voice, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why he needed photos of them.
“Because look. They’re all in different names,” he said quietly.
At that, she gasped and bent closer. Sure enough they were. “Did he steal them?”
“Possibly,” he said, “or he’s using fake IDs.” He flipped through the wallet and found some cash, as in several hundred dollars, which was way more money than she’d seen in a long time. Making sure nothing was of interest, he shoved the wallet back in the guy’s pocket, then Greyson proceeded to check the rest of him over. In a front pocket, he found the guy’s cell phone.
With that, she watched an almost feral smile come across his face. She crouched beside him. “You’ll need a passcode.”
He nodded. “It would be needed in most cases.” But he double tapped the screen, and, sure enough, up came the icons.
She gasped again. “Seriously?”
He nodded, looked at her, and said, “Did you call the cops?”
She hesitated, not wanting to leave him alone with the phone and miss something. “I’ll call in a minute,” she said.
He chuckled. “You make a great sidekick.”
“Not exactly what I was going for in life,” she said drily.
He nodded and smiled. “You could do much better.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “So far you and the dog have teamed up to save my son’s life and mine. And speaking of which”—she spied the dog as she laid on the grass beside them—“I never got the rope.” She quickly went to the garage and picked up a bundle she remembered being there, although it was more of a braided cord. While here, she placed a quick call to 9-1-1, then returned to the scenario outside. “This is all I have,” she said quietly and set the rope next to him.
He looked up from taking photographs of the guy’s phone screen. Then he connected the two phones with a cord.
She frowned and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Transferring contact information,” he said, just above a whisper, as he reached out for the braided cord and quickly created a loop at one end. Walking over to the dog, he sat down, and, with the loop up over his shoulder, he reached out and gently scratched the dog on the back of the neck. In a smooth move that she’d never seen before, he lowered the loop down his arm and very quickly around the dog’s neck. With Kona now on a rough leash, she seemed to understand and behaved more like a War Dog, Jessica presumed.
When Greyson stood and commanded the dog to come, the dog walked toward them. When he told her to heel, she went around his back and sat on his right side. Greyson reached down and gave several rewarding scratches and reinforcement to Kona.
Jessica shook her head. “I’m really glad you got her,” she said. In the distance she heard sirens, and she groaned. “Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you. I also called the cops.”
He nodded. Walking back to where the phones were, he gave a small sound of satisfaction and quickly disconnected them, putting the guy’s phone back in his pocket, then sat down on the veranda step beside the stalker as Greyson sent those contacts to Badger to cull through.
Once her attacker came to, lying between Greyson and Kona, he knew he was caught. When he heard the sirens, he panicked. “I’ll give you money to let me go,” he hissed, then he stayed silent.
“I’m sure you would,” she snapped, “but you’ve been stalking me and my son, making our lives miserable for a long time now.”
He shrugged. “The money was good.”
“Yeah? Who’s paying you? That’s what I want to know,” she said.
He gave her a half a smile. And, from the position he was in, facedown on the wooden veranda, it was a pretty strong caricature of a real smile.
When the cops pulled up out front, she headed to the front door. Before long, two policemen were out on the rear veranda with them. They looked at the scenario. One pushed his hat back and said, “Well, well, well. We’ve had rumors of somebody skulking around this area.”
“Well, now the rumors are a whole lot more than that,” Greyson said. “We caught him trying to attack Jessica on her veranda here, while holding her son.” Greyson motioned to Kona, who sat at his feet. “Kona here stopped him.”
“We have to get statements from you two,” he said, “but first I’ll get this guy into the car.” He helped him to his feet, then led him around the side of the house.
The second cop brought out his notepad and started asking questions as he jotted down notes.
There wasn’t a whole lot they could say, and she noticed that Greyson kept his words very simple. He didn’t say anything about the dog being here on its own, so she followed his lead, saying that she had felt like she was being watched several times. She had talked to her mother and her sister about it but hadn’t called the police because she didn’t know what to tell them.
“Well, this is the best-case scenario,” the cop said. “You’ve caught your stalker. So we’ll take him down to the station and charge him. I will need you to come in and sign statements tomorrow though.”
“Not a problem,” she said. “I can come in the morning, if that’s okay.”
“That sounds good,” he said, and he headed around the house to the front yard.
She turned to look at Greyson, relief washing through her. “That went better than I expected.”
“Sometimes,” he said with a gentle smile, “when you keep your words to a minimum, things go smoother.” He frowned, then cocked his head to the side.
“Now what?” She couldn’t hear anything. She watched as Greyson and Kona walked to the side of the house, listening intently. Finally he looked at her and said, “They haven’t driven away,” he said. He and the dog walked farther. Greyson added, “I’ll go out front.”
Jessica went inside, closed the glass doors, and locked them. Then darted to look out the front window. Sure enough, the cop car was still sitting in her front yard. As she stepped out the front door, Greyson and Kona came around the side, and she watched Kona’s coat immediately bristle, as a growl came from the back of her throat. Jessica came around the front porch to see one cop lying unconscious on the driveway and, on the other side, where Greyson was, lay the other cop. But the guy from her backyard was nowhere to be found.
She stared at Greyson in horror, as he knelt beside the first, then the second cop, checking both men’s condition.
Grim faced, he pulled out his phone and made calls. Kona wouldn’t calm down at all. The ridge on the back of her neck was up, and she paced back and forth, as far as the rope would let her.
“It’s almost like she knows where he’s gone,” she said.