"I didn't say it wasn't."
"Then—"
"Delacroix sat across from you at that table. He looked you in the face. He knows what you look like."
He sets the pen down. "If he has anyone watching Lake Borgne, and if that structure is what you think it is, he does. If you show up on that road with a camera, you're not a stranger asking questions. You're the witness who got out of his café."
That lands. I knew it and I was building around it anyway, which is not the same as not knowing.
"I can work at a distance," I say. "Long lens. I don't have to get close."
"How close is close enough to confirm the structure?"
"Close enough that a long lens covers it."
"And if someone is running the route that day? If a vehicle comes down that road while you're on it?"
"Then I drive away."
"In a car they can follow."
"Judge—"
"He knows your face." He says it again, flat, because it's the point that ends the argument and he knows it. "By now, he knows everything else about you. Your name, your magazine, your editor. He can work backward from the tip line call and get to most of it. But your face he has from six feet away in a French Quarter café, and that doesn't change no matter how careful you are on that road."
I look at him across the table. He's right. I've been constructing the argument around that fact rather than through it, and he found it in about thirty seconds.
"The lead is still real," I say.
"I know it is."
"We can't confirm it without boots on the ground."
"Not yours."
"Then whose? You send one of your brothers down there and they don't know what they're looking at. I do."
I lean forward. "My read on this evidence is the whole reason we have anything. It's the reason the feds can build a case once we tell them what we have. It's the reason Sal's name came up at all. You don't get to use what my eyes can do and then tell me my eyes can't leave the compound."
"I'm not saying your eyes can't leave the compound. I'm saying your face can't go to Lake Borgne." He looks at me steadily. "Those are different problems with different solutions."
"Then tell me the solution."
"I'm working on it."
"You're stalling."
"I'm thinking." His voice doesn't change. "There's a difference."
I look at him. The jaw set, the eyes level, the specific quality of a man who has made a decision and is prepared to hold it but is not, I notice, telling me I'm wrong about the lead.
"You're treating me like cargo," I say.
Something moves in his face. "I'm trying to keep you alive," he says.
"So am I. That's the whole point." I hold his gaze. "The lead is real. I know how to work it, and your alternative is to sit on what might be the location of a holding facility while four girls are still missing. So tell me the solution, because I'm not willing to table this."
He stands.
