Page 157 of Only the Hunter

All thoughts to keep to myself.

Jake crosses back to us. He has the particular set to his jaw that means there’s something he’s deciding how to say.

“They searched him,” he says. To Evie, not to me. “When Brie brought him down.”

Evie lifts her gaze.

“He had a phone.” Jake pauses. “And a piece of paper. Folded. Typed.”

The quality of Evie’s stillness changes.

“Three paragraphs,” Jake continues, and his voice has dropped to something quieter than his usual register. “It was written in the first person. Written like it was meant to sound like Evie.”

Silence presses in.

I watch Evie’s face. She’s very still, the way I imagine she gets before a cross-examination—all the motion going inward, everything that matters moving behind her eyes—fast, efficient, ruthless in its clarity. She’s already three steps ahead.

“They weren’t going to stage a break-in,” she says. “I suspected as much.”

“They definitely didn’t want any signs of an intruder. Used a cell phone blocker just in case—didn’t want any 911 calls.”

“The new deadbolt didn’t slow them down at all?” she asks.

“Not enough to matter,” Jake says. “Whoever this was, picking a residential lock—even a good one—wasn’t the hard part of the job.”

“Clean entry. No forced locks. No sign of a struggle.” Her voice flattens into prosecutorial cadence. “A DOJ attorney on leave. Exhibiting stress. Colleagues suggested therapy. Documented instability. A tragic outcome.” She stops. “The note would have closed the case permanently.”

“That’s what we think,” Jake says.

She nods once. Very slow. “I want to see it.”

“Evie—”

“I need to see how it’s written,” she says. “If it references anything internal—case terminology, personnel language, anything from my file—that narrows the field immediately. That’s not cartel improvisation. That’s access.”

Her eyes flick to mine. “And if it sounds like me—if the cadence is right—then someone’s been studying my work.”

Jake looks at me.

I look at Evie.

She’s right. She’s been right about most things since the beginning of this, and the times she wasn’t right, she was only wrong about the scale, not the direction. I’ve spent the better part of this case managing her proximity to the danger, and every time I’ve done that I’ve slowed us down. She just survived someone picking the lock on her office door by talking through it in her prosecutor’s voice, building a record in real time because she understood what the moment required.

And she was right about the breach.

Right about the escalation.

Right about the bait.

It’s tempting to step in front of her.

She doesn’t need that.

“Let her see it,” I say.

Jake nods and moves off.

Evie stands for a moment, hand braced against the side of the vehicle. I watch the recalibration happen in her posture—the shift from reaction to strategy. She’s already thinking about leverage. About interrogation timing. About whose phrasing will betray them.