Chapter 23 #2
She put her hands on his shoulders. Felt him solid and warm and present under her palms. Ran them up to his shoulders, his neck, the sides of his face, reading him like she would read a document that had been missing from the file and finally resurfaced. Present. Intact. Real.
That was when she found it.
A small cut just below the hairline on his left side. Scabbed over, maybe two days old, a thin line of broken skin partially hidden by the hat.
Her fingers stopped moving.
"What is this." Not a question. The voice she used when a witness changed their testimony on the stand.
Jake's hand came up and covered hers, gently pulling it away from the cut. "Nothing happened, Em. I promise you. A tree branch was the only hostile I encountered the entire time."
She searched his face. Ran through every tell she'd cataloged over these weeks, every micro-expression she'd learned to read in a man who was trained to show nothing he didn't choose to show.
His eyes were clear. Tired, but clear. No tension in the muscles along his jaw, no guarded quality behind the warmth. He was telling the truth.
"A tree branch."
"It was dark. I was moving through brush near a property line and a live oak took a clean shot at me." The corner of his mouth lifted. "I'd give it a seven for technique. Solid ambush positioning."
"This isn't funny."
"It's a little funny."
"I haven't slept in two days, Jake."
The humor left his face. Not abruptly, not like a door closing.
It drained out, just as warmth leaves the air when the sun goes behind a cloud, and what remained was the thing underneath that he carried when he thought nobody was paying attention.
Except she was always paying attention now, and they both knew it.
"I know," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize. Come here."
She pulled him toward her and he went. His arms closed around her with the pressure of a man who understood exactly what the last two days had cost and was not going to pretend they hadn't happened.
Emily pressed her face into him, into the smell of road and old coffee and pine resin that might have been the tree that cut him, and felt her body give up a tension she hadn't been able to name because naming it would have meant admitting how far it reached.
He held her. In a parking garage, under fluorescent lights, with his bag still in the back seat and the engine ticking as it cooled. He held her how he held everything that mattered to him. Completely. Without qualification. Without glancing over her shoulder to check whether anyone was watching.
They stood there. Emily counted to ten because she needed a number, a boundary, a unit of measurement to contain what she was feeling, and ten seemed like enough. She got to six and gave up counting.
"I found him," Jake said into her hair.
Emily went still.
"He's at the cabin. Never left. He's been there the whole time."
She pulled back far enough to see his face. "How?"
"I'll tell you everything. Ray needs to hear it too." His thumb traced her cheekbone, the gesture she'd learned to recognize as the thing he did when he wanted to look at her without needing the excuse of a conversation. "But I needed this first. Before the briefing, before the plan. This."
Two days ago she'd straightened his collar in a government hallway because it was the only way she could touch him in a building full of colleagues.
Now she was standing in a parking garage with both hands on his face and his arms around her waist and a missing witness located, and the order of operations told her everything she needed to know about what Jake Walsh considered mission-critical.
Her. Before the case. Before the debrief. Her.
"Ray's in his office," she said.
"Figured."
"He's been patient. Unusually patient, which means he's worried."
"Ray worries by being calm. It's his worst quality."
She almost smiled. Touched the cut one more time, gently, tracing the edge of it with her fingertip as you'd trace the border of a country on a map, memorizing the shape of it, filing away the proof that two days in the field had cost him nothing worse than an argument with Florida vegetation.
She filed that proof in the space between relief and the silent fury of a woman who'd been given back the thing she'd spent two days being afraid of losing.
"Let's go," she said.
She didn't step away from him. She turned within the circle of his arms and walked toward the elevator, and he fell into step beside her with his hand settling against the small of her back, the warmth of it reaching her through her blouse as it always did.
In the elevator she pressed the button for Ray's floor and stood next to him and said nothing, because the silence between them now was a different species entirely than the silence of the last two days.
This one had texture and the density of two people occupying the same air again after an absence that had rearranged things neither of them had expected to be rearrangeable.
Jake reached over and took her hand. He didn't look at her when he did it. Just found her fingers and laced them through his, the manner you pick up a book you'd set down mid-sentence, knowing exactly which page you were on.
The elevator doors opened. Emily let go of his hand before they stepped into the hallway.
Not because she wanted to, but because this was still a federal building and she was still a prosecutor and the lines between personal and professional served a purpose even when you'd spent two days wishing they didn't exist.
Ray's door was open. He was behind his desk, jacket off, reading a brief on his screen with the focused attention of a man who was working because the alternative was waiting, and Ray Crawford did not wait well when someone he cared about was in the field.
He looked up when they appeared in the doorway.
His eyes went to Jake first, conducting the assessment that thirty years of friendship had made automatic.
Then to Emily, reading her face with the same process he used to read a courtroom.
Then back to Jake, and whatever the combined assessment told him made him lean back in his chair and exhale through his nose in a way that communicated more than most people managed in a paragraph.
"You look like hell," Ray said.
"I've been told." Jake dropped into one of the chairs across from Ray's desk with the loose-limbed ease of a man who'd been sleeping in his vehicle and eating gas station food and was finally in a room where he could stop performing readiness.
Emily took the other chair. The formation was automatic by now, the three of them in this configuration: Ray behind the desk, Jake and Emily across from him.
The geometry of a team that had been assembled by a man who planned further ahead than anyone gave him credit for.
"Two days," Ray said. "You had three. I told Morrison you were running down a lead that required time and discretion.
He didn't love it. I didn't give him a choice.
" His eyes were level, carrying the exacting patience of a man who'd spent those two days fielding questions he couldn't answer about an operative he couldn't locate. "Tell me you brought me a present."
"Costa's at the cabin."
Ray's expression didn't change. But his hands, which had been resting loosely on the armrests, went still with a precision that told Emily he hadn't expected this answer.
"The cabin we searched."
"The cabin everyone searched. Marshals included.
" Jake leaned forward, forearms on his knees, the posture he adopted when he was laying out operational detail and wanted his audience tracking every word.
"He never left, Ray. He staged the interior to look like he'd been there and bolted.
Food in the trash, bed slept in but not made, coffee pot cold but not moldy.
Classic false trail, well-executed for an amateur.
Then he went to ground in a structure on the property that doesn't appear on any county survey, any satellite image, or any of the records I could pull. "
"What structure?"
"That's where Emily comes in. I don't have the answer yet.
" Jake glanced at her, and even in the middle of a briefing the glance carried warmth that didn't belong in a professional context and that Emily received without trying to pretend she hadn't.
"I spent two nights watching the property from a tree line about two hundred yards out.
First night, nothing moved. Second night, just before dawn, a woman drove onto the access road in a blue Honda Civic, left a cooler and two grocery bags at the edge of the tree line, and drove away.
Forty minutes later, a man came out of the woods from the southeast, collected the bags, and disappeared back the same way he'd come. "
"You saw him."
Jake pulled his phone from his pocket, opened the camera roll, and slid it across the desk.
Emily leaned forward. The photos were grainy, shot at distance in low light, but clear enough.
A man, thinner than his file photo, unkempt, moving with the speed of someone who'd been doing this long enough to have a routine.
The second image caught him at the tree line retrieving the bags, his face turned partially toward the camera by the accident of reaching for a handle.
"That's Costa," Emily said.
"And the woman is Angela Costa. His wife.
I ran her plates through my own channels, not the federal system.
" Jake swiped to another photo. Angela's Civic on the access road, the timestamp visible in the corner.
"She's been making that drive regularly.
Once a week, near as I can tell from the tire tracks on the road. She's been keeping him alive."