"Yes."
"You're with the club like Daniel? David’s nephew," she qualifies.
"Yeah. And Echo–Daniel–sent me."
"What's your name?"
"Judge."
She turns her head and looks at me, and even in the afternoon light coming through the glass I can feel the attention of it. Not the way most people look at you, registering your presence, clocking your relevance, moving on. This is different. Slower. The look of someone who is used to finding things in a frame that other people walk past without seeing.
"Is that what people call you or what you're called?" she asks.
"Both."
She looks back out the window. "Jesslyn Meyers."
"I know."
"Of course you do." It's not unfriendly. Just precise. She's filing information the same way I am, building the picture of who she's in a truck with on a Louisiana highway, deciding what it means.
"The man at the café," I say. "Delacroix."
"What about him?"
"You recognized him."
"Before I sat down." She says it the way she says everything. Clean, no performance in it. "I had his face on a memory card. A photographer's eye doesn't lose a face once it's filed it."
"You sat down anyway."
"Running immediately, before I knew who else was watching, would have been worse." She pauses. "He wanted the cards. That's what the meeting was. He wanted to know what I had so he could figure out what to do about me. I didn't give him anything he could use."
I look at the road. "And the cards?"
"All of them. Right here." She touches the camera bag with her foot. "Fifty-three frames. He's in thirty-one of them."
I don't say anything to that. There's nothing to say that isn't either obvious or premature, so I let it sit, and she lets it sit with me, and the highway runs out under the truck.
She asks questions for the first two hours.
Not nervous questions. Not the kind people ask when they're scared and filling silence to keep from thinking. These are methodical. She wants to know about the club, about Magnolia Bend, about what happens when we get there.
She asks about the compound, about who'll be present, about what protocol looks like for someone arriving in her situation.
I answer in as few words as the question will allow, not because I'm being difficult but because the answers aregenuinely short. You'll have a room. You'll meet the president. Someone will come out to meet you at the gate.
"What does the president know about me?" she asks.
"That you witnessed something, that you have documentation, that Delacroix knows your face."
"Does he know about the tip line? That they routed me directly to him?"
"He will by the time we get there."
She's quiet for a moment, looking out at the passing tree line. "That's not an accident," she says. "The routing. Someone flagged my call before it went through. Someone who knew what to listen for."
"Probably."
