She'd give Jake the time.
Then she'd go find him.
And then, when the time was right, she'd make sure Jasper Marchand understood exactly what he'd done.
CHAPTER 14
He drove. No destination. No route. Just the act of moving, the engine and the road and the muscle memory of turns he didn't think about.
He ended up at Anna's.
He didn't decide to come here. His hands made the turns and his feet worked the pedals and the Range Rover found the parking lot the way it found all the places Jake went when the noise got too loud. The hand-painted sign in the window. The bell above the door that had chimed for him since he was seventeen.
The restaurant was empty. Mid-afternoon dead zone, tables wiped and waiting. Anna was behind the counter with her crossword and her reading glasses low on her nose. She looked up when the bell chimed.
She set down her pencil.
"Sit," she said.
"Just came by to see you." He gave her the smile. The easy one. The one that worked on everyone and had been working on everyone since he was old enough to understand what it did. "Thought I'd grab lunch."
"You don't want lunch."
"Yes I do."
She didn't go to the kitchen. She pulled out the chair at the small table by the window and sat down. "Try again."
Jake stood by the counter. The smile was still on his face but it was costing him now, the way a held note costs a singer who's running out of air.
"I'm fine, Anna."
"You're pretending to be fine. There's a difference, and I've known you long enough to see it." She nodded at the chair across from her. "Sit down."
He sat.
Anna folded her hands on the table. Waited. She was better at waiting than anyone he'd ever met, including people who'd been trained for it in places where waiting wrong got you killed.
"Bad day," he said.
"I can see that."
"I'll work through it."
"I know you will. You always do. That's the problem." She tilted her head, the glasses catching the light. "You work through everything, and you never let anyone help you carry it, and you come to my restaurant because you know I'll let you sit here without pushing. But today I'm pushing."
Jake looked at the table. At the window. At the hand-painted letters reversed by the afternoon light.
"Marchand came in today," he said. "He sat in Ray's conference room and used the worditching. Like twelve years and every face I carry is a behavioral note in a file somewhere."
"And that's why you're here? Because a man in a suit spoke ugly about your service?"
“Yes. No." Jake turned the water glass Anna had set down at some point without him noticing. "That part I can handle. People who've never done anything hard have opinions about people who have. That's not new."
"So what is it?"
"Emily." He said it like a fact he’d learned since the conference room. "She's an AUSA with a career she built from scratch. First in her class at every stop. Every job she's ever had, she earned by being better than everyone around her. And Marchand sat in that room and I could see him doing the math. Not just on me. On her. On what it costs a prosecutor's career to be standing next to the guy he just called a liability."
"He said that?"
