“Judge Martha Aldridge,” Jack said finally. “She’s been on the bench in King George for twenty-five years without an ethics complaint, and her name isn’t anywhere in Margot’s findings. No donations, no property connections, no business ties. She’s clean.” He looked at me. “I’ll call her tonight.”
“She’ll have to move fast,” I said. “Those coordinates in T-Bone’s shoe have tomorrow’s date. If there’s a fight happening tomorrow night and we’re sitting on the location?—”
“I know.” His eyes were steady and sharp. “We’ll make sure she has plenty of evidence to sign off on them. We’ll hit that location Saturday night while the fight is in progress. Fighters, organizers, money, whoever Stavros has running the operation on the ground. One shot.”
“And if the leak tips them off?”
“Margot’s tracing the burner phone network tonight. If someone in my department is talking to Stavros’s people, there’s a digital trail.” He turned onto Catherine of Aragon and the funeral home appeared at the end of the block, dark and quiet in the early evening, the elm trees throwing long shadows across the front lawn. “Tomorrow morning I’ll handpick a team I trust and debrief. But the tunnel location and the tactical plan stay with me, you, and Doug until the last minute.”
“Home?” I asked.
“And food. The lemon bars aren’t cutting it for me anymore. I need protein.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sky had turned while we were inside the bank.
What had been hazy and thick when we’d walked in was now something else entirely—a bruised green-gray that pressed low over the rooftops and swallowed the last of the afternoon light. The air hit me the moment we stepped through the door, heavy and close. It was a wet heat that coated your skin and sat in your lungs like a warm cloth. It smelled different too—that sharp mineral tang underneath the river smell and the honeysuckle, the scent of ozone and charged air that every Virginian learned to read before they learned to read words. The trees along the square had gone still, that breathless stillness that came right before the sky opened up and reminded you who was actually in charge.
“We’ve got maybe twenty minutes,” I said, watching the clouds stack to the west in dark, rolling layers that looked solid enough to bruise. “Maybe less.”
“Good,” Jack said. His hands were easy at his sides, but nothing else about him was. “I want the rain. I want people off the streets tonight.”
He didn’t say why. He didn’t need to.
We drove with the windows cracked because the AC couldn’t keep up with what the air was doing outside—pushing in warm and damp through the vents, thick with the green smell of a world bracing for impact. The light had gone strange, that eerie amber glow that happened when the sun dropped below a storm shelf and lit everything from underneath, turning the fields to gold and the tree line to black and making the whole landscape look like a painting done by someone who understood that beauty and danger were often the same thing.
The first drops hit the windshield as we waited for the gate to open and turned onto the gravel drive—fat and heavy, the kind that burst on contact and left marks the size of quarters. By the time Jack killed the engine, they were coming fast enough to blur the porch light into a yellow smear. We ran for the door, and the rain chased us inside with the sudden, full-throated violence of a storm that had been holding back all day and was finished with patience.
The house closed around us—cool stone walls, the tick of the old clock, the faint thump of bass from Doug’s room two floors up that meant he was alive and wired and had probably been at his keyboard since this morning. Jack touched my hip as he passed me in the hallway, a brief, warm pressure that said everything and asked nothing, and then he was heading for the bedroom to change. Three minutes later I heard the large sliding door that opened to the back patio and the whoosh of the gas grill being started. Soon the scent of searing meat mixed with the rain and wet stone collided with the scent of a summer evening turning violent.
That was Jack. The world falls apart, so you light a fire and feed the people you love. There was a theology in that I’d never been able to argue with.
I changed out of my clothes and into cotton shorts and a tank top. The bedroom was dim, the windows streaked with rain, and for a moment I stood there with my hand on my stomach and listened to the storm build and tried to remember the last time I’d had a Friday night that didn’t involve dead bodies.
I couldn’t. And it didn’t look like that pattern would change anytime soon.
We ate in the office with the rain hammering the windows and Margot’s data lighting up the wall screen like a war room. The steaks were perfect—Jack had grilled them on the big built-in while the storm raged beyond the patio’s edge, the rain a solid curtain of sound and motion just past the stone railing, and he’d brought them in seared dark on the outside and pink through the center with that quiet satisfaction he wore when a mission had gone exactly the way he’d planned it.
We ate at the conference table because Margot needed the wall screen, and the work wasn’t going to wait for us to digest. But for the first few minutes, nobody talked about work. Nobody talked about the case or the warrants or the bodies I’d had to dissect. For a few minutes, we were just a family sitting down to a meal while the rain tried to tear the world apart outside.
Doug had set Margot’s plate at the end of the table nearest her laptop—a place setting with a fork and a napkin, no glass, because even Doug had limits. The screen pulsed a soft green heart when I sat down, and I felt that strange tug between absurd and tender that Margot always produced in me. An artificial intelligence who could dismantle encryption that made governments weep, and she wanted a seat at the table. There was something so deeply human about that need to belong that it made the fact of her not being human feel almost irrelevant.
“So,” I said, cutting into my steak. “We didn’t get a chance to ask yesterday. How was the ice cream shop?”
Doug’s fork stopped moving. Color crept up his neck the way it had in the kitchen yesterday morning when he’d mentioned the girl from his guild, and I watched him calculate whether deflection was possible, realize it wasn’t, and surrender to the inevitable with the resigned dignity of a sixteen-year-old who knew he was outnumbered.
“Her name’s Kayla,” he said, studying his baked potato with determined focus. “She’s seventeen. She has her own car. She did not try to kidnap or murder me, and she is, in fact, not a fifty-year-old man.”
“That’s a relief,” Jack said.
“She’s a junior at Colonial Beach High. She does competitive robotics and she’s already been accepted early admission to Virginia Tech for computer science.” He risked a glance up and found both of us watching him with a quiet interest that made him realize he wasn’t fooling anyone, and never had been.
“We just talked. It was fine. She’s cool.”
“I would like to know more about this Kayla,” Margot said. “Specifically, her qualifications.”
