Emily walked back to her office. Closed the door. Sat down at her desk and opened the Vance file.
The Delgado spreadsheets were still on her desktop. Three weeks of analytical work, organized and cross-referenced, half of it incomplete. She'd need to absorb everything Delgado had built and carry it forward herself. Forty hours she'd have to carve from nights and weekends, time she would have spent at The Anchor or on Jake's couch or anywhere that wasn't this office. Marchand's petty little victory, measurable in hours stolen.
She'd find them. She always did.
Jake was somewhere in Tampa right now. Working his network. Moving through spaces she couldn't follow him into. And Jasper Marchand was three floors above her, watching badge logs and pulling analysts and building a case against the people who'd had the audacity to trust a man whose only crime was being exactly who he said he was.
She picked up her phone. Set it down. Jake's check-in wasn't for another four hours. Four hours of silence and fluorescent light and the knowledge that the man she was falling in love with was operating in the gray while a man who'd never risked anything was sharpening knives for the people who'd let him go.
She opened the Delgado files. Not the Morrison memo. Not anymore. The work that actually mattered, the work Marchandhad just tried to sabotage, and she was going to do it herself and do it better because that was how Emily Callahan responded to men who thought inconvenience was the same as defeat.
Four hours.
She started typing.
CHAPTER 23
Jake had been watching the blue Honda Civic for forty minutes when Angela Costa finally appeared.
She came out of the house on Westland Avenue at 2:03, moving with the efficiency of a woman who'd performed this routine enough times to have it memorized but not enough times to stop being afraid. Grocery bags in one hand, a small cooler in the other, sunglasses despite the overcast afternoon. She loaded everything into the back seat, not the trunk, then sat behind the wheel for nearly a full minute before starting the engine.
From his position two blocks away in a strip mall parking lot, Jake watched her check her mirrors three times. Amateur counter surveillance, but not bad for someone whose only training had come from three weeks of terror and a husband who used to move money for people who killed witnesses.
She pulled out. Jake gave her a four-car buffer and followed.
The drive took thirty-seven minutes. Angela drove exactly the speed limit, signaled every turn, stopped completely at every sign. She took a route that meandered through residential neighborhoods before hitting the rural roads that led toward the fish camps and hunting cabins scattered through the swampcountry east of Tampa. A route designed to flush any tail, executed with the paranoid precision of someone who knew that one mistake would cost her husband his life.
Jake stayed far enough back that she wouldn't spot him, close enough that he wouldn't lose her if she turned. He'd done this kind of follow more times than he could count, but never with stakes this personal. Never with his pulse doing things it hadn't done since his first patrol, never with the emptiness that came from knowing Emily was sitting in her office, tracking time, wondering if he was coming back.
The property appeared exactly where his research had suggested it would. A shell road leading off the state highway, posted signs warning about trespassing, a gate that stood open because nobody had been out here to close it since the owner died. Angela turned without slowing, and Jake kept driving.
He circled back through a hunting access point three miles south, parked the Range Rover in a boat launch area where it would look like any other weekend fisherman's ride, and spent twenty minutes working his way through cypress and palmetto to a tree line that gave him a clear sight picture of the cabin.
Angela was already there. The Civic was parked beside the structure, and she was unloading the bags. Jake stood behind a fallen pine and raised his camera.
Through the lens, he watched her work. She didn't approach the cabin. Instead, she carried the cooler and bags to the edge of the tree line on the north side and set them down. Then she stepped back and called out to Ryan, he assumed.
She waited.
Forty-three minutes later, a man emerged from the woods.
Even through the telephoto lens, Jake recognized him immediately. Thinner than his DMV photo, hair longer, clothes that had been clean a week ago. But the face was unmistakable.Ryan Costa. Alive. Hiding in plain sight fifty yards from a cabin that had been searched by U.S. Marshals.
Jake took seventeen photos in the space of two minutes. Costa collecting the supplies. Costa looking toward the cabin. Costa glancing around with the furtive wariness of a man who'd been living in the woods for three weeks. The clearest shot came when Costa turned back toward the tree line - profile, three-quarter view, and a straight-on image that would stand up in any courtroom.
Then Costa melted back into the woods, moving southeast, and Angela got in the Civic and drove away.
Jake stayed in position for another hour. Costa didn't reappear. No other vehicles approached. By 2:30 he was confident he'd seen everything there was to see.
Ryan Costa was hiding in a structure that didn't appear on any county survey. A smokehouse, most likely, or an old hunting blind. Built by the original property owner decades ago and forgotten by everyone except a grandfather who'd told stories to a grandson who'd grown up and become an accountant who moved money for criminals.
He worked his way back to the Range Rover the same route he'd used coming in. The photos on his camera were worth more than Emily's career and Costa's life combined.
He was loading his gear when it hit him.
Not the tactical analysis. Not the operational implications of finding Costa or the next steps needed to bring him in safely. A entirely different feeling.
Sitting in the front seat of the Range Rover with the engine running and sweat cooling on his forehead, Jake Walsh realized he didn't want to be alone anymore.
