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could just be a horny guy who’d decided to check out the hot chick—Melody had gone to the cafe wearing an oversized tunic over slinky salmon-colored tights that left nothing to the imagination—but I didn’t think so. Something about this guy’s posture said his interest wasn’t casual.
    Was this Melody’s stalker?
    Would a stalker be that bold? I’d had a mental image of a guy lurking in shadows or hiding in his car, like I was, and conducting discrete surveillance of his subject. Not somebody standing out in the open checking her out like a guy at a singles’ club.
    I kept clicking off pictures, hoping that the guy would turn around and give me a few full face shots.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Melody drive her brand new Volkswagen Beetle out of the parking lot and onto California Avenue. She’d be driving right past me, but as long as I stayed still in my car, chances were she wouldn’t see me. From what I’d observed so far from tailing her, Melody was fairly oblivious to her surroundings while she was driving.
    I was so busy concentrating on the guy on the sidewalk who’d turned to watch Melody drive away that I almost didn’t see another car pull away from the curb and into traffic directly behind Melody’s car.
    The second car was a white SUV, a smaller model with tinted windows—what car salesmen liked to call “soccer mom” cars—and it had been parked on the street almost right in front of the cafe’s parking lot along with a bunch of other similar cars crowded against the curb.
    I hadn’t seen anyone get in the SUV. I would have noticed. Which meant that whoever was in that car, they’d been sitting inside the car at least as long as I’d been sitting in mine.
    Someone else doing surveillance?
    I refocused the camera and managed to click off a couple of quick shots of the white SUV as it drove past me, now a couple of car lengths behind Melody’s car. The sun glinted off the windshield at precisely the wrong angle. I’d hoped to at least get an impression of whether the driver was a man or woman, but I couldn’t tell. At least I thought I’d gotten a shot of the license plate.
    The whole thing with the SUV could have been a coincidence, but it didn’t feel like it. That car had been waiting for Melody.
    Had I seen it earlier today and not realized it? I had no idea. It seemed like everyone in the city drove an SUV, and a majority of the SUVs were white. Nothing I’d spotted on this one made it stand out from any other white SUV on the road.
    Then there was the guy outside the cafe. He’d hung around just to stare at Melody while he pretended to look at something on his cell phone.
    Or was he taking pictures of her with his cell? The newer cell phones could take camera quality photographs. I’d taken some of my own for Norton Greenburger.
    After a morning of nothing, I suddenly had two potential stalkers. The white SUV had been heading west on California. The guy on foot outside the restaurant was heading toward the same parking lot where Melody had parked her car. I couldn’t tail them both, so I had to decide which one to follow.
    Based on the schedule Ryan had provided, I knew Melody was working at the gym that afternoon. She coached spin classes at one-thirty and three, and wouldn’t be leaving again until at least four. If the SUV was tailing her, I knew where it would be. With any luck, I already had a license plate number, and if I didn’t, I could grab it later in the afternoon.
    The man on foot, on the other hand—I had nothing but his picture. No name. No license plate number. No fingerprint or DNA or even shoe size.
    I needed something else.
    I put my car in gear and drove toward the parking lot.

 
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 5
     
     
    THE MAN WHO’D BEEN STANDING on the sidewalk staring at Melody didn’t get into a car in the parking lot next to the cafe. Instead he cut through the lot on foot and kept walking down Hill Street toward downtown.
    Following a