We have her read on what the facility looks like from the water versus the road, and what those angles mean for where the route runs.
"Bring her in," Templar says.
Jesslyn comes to the planning session at noon.
She doesn't dress differently for it. Same cargo pants, same boots, same camera bag over her shoulder out of habit even though she's not shooting today. She sits at the end of the table across from Templar, sets her laptop up, and doesn't look to me for anything before she begins.
I watch Templar watch her, which is the more useful thing to watch in this room.
She opens with the satellite overlay she's been building — the bayou clearing, the waterway, the mapped approach routes — and she walks through methodically, completely, without assuming the room needs her to slow down. Templar's eyessharpen about ninety seconds in. Pawn leans forward. West stops looking at his phone.
"The structure visible in the background frames," she says, pulling up the enhanced resolution pull, "is consistent with a commercial fishing shed on the eastern edge of Lake Borgne. The roofline angle, the dock post visible in the lower left, the position relative to the waterway… I've been on that road and I know that specific section of shoreline from a shoot I did two years ago. If this is the Chalmette facility Sisco's contact flagged, it sits on the same water access route that the bayou clearing uses."
She pauses. "They're running a linked chain. The girls are held at the facility, transferred to the bayou clearing by water, then moved through the operation. The holding facility is close enough to the route that the transfer window is minimal, which is exactly why it hasn't attracted attention. It reads as commercial fishing traffic. There's nothing irregular to see unless you know what you're looking at."
"What's your confidence level on that read?" Templar asks.
"On the structure being the one I photographed, eighty percent. On the linked chain theory, seventy. I'd need boots on the ground at the facility to get higher than that on either. But the overlap between what I can see in the frames and what Sisco's contact is describing is significant. I've been conservative with those numbers."
Templar nods. He asks four more questions, each one precise, aimed at the gaps in what she's presented rather than at what she's already covered. She answers all four without hedging, without deferring to me, without modulating for the room.
When Pawn pushes back on the confidence levels she doesn't back down. Instead, she explains the methodology, how a photographer reads angle and light and structure, how degradedresolution limits the read but doesn't eliminate it, and what it would take to sharpen those numbers to something actionable. Pawn listens. He doesn't push back again.
When she's done, the room is quiet for a moment in the specific way rooms go quiet when the information that's just landed is good and everyone knows it.
I sit at the table, watch her hold that room, and think about the bar on Bourbon Street. The corner booth with her back to the wall, cataloguing exits. I think about the gun room at two in the morning and the bayou frames and the patient, precise way she's been working this evidence. Not toward a conclusion she wanted, but toward whatever the evidence actually showed, which is a rarer thing than people think.
She came here with a memory card full of photographs and she has turned it into the most actionable intelligence this club has had since the girls went missing.
She is not a liability.
She is the sharpest set of eyes in this room, and everyone at this table knows it now, and I feel something that has nothing to do with pride. Pride implies it's about me, and this has nothing to do with me at all.
After the session, Templar walks her to the door and says something to her in a low voice. She nods and says something back and he nods, and I read both nods without needing to hear the words.
He's telling her what she brought matters. She's telling him she knows. Neither of them need me to be part of that exchange.
I find Recon and we start building the operational plan.
The planning runs through the afternoon and into the evening. Seven days if the window holds, if the intelligence is good, if the facility is the right facility.
Seven days to get eyes on the Chalmette property, confirm the access routes, establish the contact with the feds, andcoordinate the kind of operation that takes a trafficking network apart at the roots rather than cutting off a branch and watching it grow back.
I come to dinner late and leave early. I go to my room, sit on the edge of the bed, look at the six men on the wall, and work the operational timeline for the fourth time. I find the same two gaps I found the previous three times and build around them.
Templar comes in at some point and we work through the plan together for another hour. He asks the questions I haven't answered yet. I answer most of them. The ones I can't answer yet he notes and sets aside, which is what Templar does with things he can't yet resolve. He doesn't push for answers that don't exist, he just marks the absence and comes back to it when something changes.
When he leaves, the room is quiet. The gaps are still on the table. The six men are still on the wall.
Jesslyn knocks at ten.
She comes in without waiting for more than the come in, which is the way we've been with each other since the night of the shooting, and she sits in the chair across from the bed and looks at me.
"You're running the names," she says.
I look at her. I haven't said a word. I haven't made a sound. I've been sitting in the same position since Templar left.
"Your face," she says. "The way it looks when you're counting something that costs you."
