Page 159 of Only the Hunter

Evie

The note is three paragraphs.

I read it twice in the back of Jake’s car, under the blue-white wash of passing streetlights that turn everything briefly sterile and then shadowed again. The evidence bag crackles faintly in my hands. I hold it at the corners, the way they teach you in your first year—edges only, no contamination—muscle memory from a time when evidence felt clinical instead of personal.

Jake didn’t comment on how long I took. He drove and let me read.

The first paragraph establishes exhaustion. The second establishes isolation. The third is the resolution—the particular language of someone who has decided, framed as peace rather than defeat. It’s structured correctly. The cadence is close. Whoever wrote it did their research.

But research isn’t the same as knowing. There’s a violation in imitation. In someone studying the shape of your thoughts closely enough to counterfeit them.

There are two words in the second paragraph—bureaucratic machinery—that I use in writing but almost never in speech. They appear in my case memos. My internal DOJ documentation. A specific internal memo I wrote eighteen months ago—never filed, never public, the kind of thing that exists only in my personnel file and whatever system stores attorney work product. Someone pulled that file, or had access to it, and built this note the way you’d build a forgery: technically accurate, structurally sound, and wrong in the way that only someone who knows the original well enough would catch.

I set the bag on my knee and look out the window.

The problem is that two potential authors come to mind.

And both of them have, in different ways, already betrayed me.

One of them is Michael Harridan.

The other is Rebecca Hanford.

The Sixth District station on Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast is the kind of building that looks like what it is—functional, institutional, slightly worn at the edges. Jake pulls into a side lot and I’m out before he kills the engine, the evidence bag in my hand, my brain running the kind of tight, unpleasant loop it runs when I have two equally viable conclusions and insufficient data to eliminate one of them.

Rebecca knows my writing as well as anyone. She’s read everything I’ve produced for three years. She’s also the one who signed the order to drop the case, who told me it was above my pay grade, who went distant and avoidant when the threats started. Those are the behaviors of someone protecting a career—or someone protecting a secret.

Harridan knows my writing too. He’s been in my professional orbit for four years, long enough to have absorbed the patterns. As DAAG, he has legitimate reason to pull personnel files that have nothing to do with him directly—reason enough that no one would think to ask why. He has a documented paper trail of concern about my mental state. He stopped by my house to check on me. Once suggested I speak to someone in employee wellness. Created the narrative this note was designed to complete.

I think it’s Harridan.

I’m not certain.

And I need to be certain before I do what I’m about to do.

The assigned prosecutor is a woman named Delgado, out of the Public Corruption unit—not my division, which is correct procedure, since I’m both a witness and on leave. She meets me in the hallway outside the interview suite, coffee in hand, the particular alert stillness of someone who has been doing this long enough to run on less sleep than the job requires.

“Thompson,” she says. Not unfriendly.

“Delgado.” I’ve heard of her. Good reputation. Doesn’t grandstand. “Has he asked for the deal yet?”

“His lawyer has. Practically before we’d finished booking him. Guy’s scared, or smart, or both. Either way, he wants to talk before someone above him decides he’s more useful silent.” She glances at the evidence bag in my hand. “You’ve read it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

I choose my words carefully. “The internal terminology narrows the field significantly. Whoever wrote it had access to my DOJ personnel file and familiarity with my documented case work. That’s not a long list.”

Delgado studies me. “You have a name.”

I feel the weight of that question in the space between us. A name isn’t just a lead. It’s an accusation.

“I have two names,” I say. “I need a photo array to eliminate one of them.”

She’s quiet for a moment. “You know I can’t let you run it.”

“I know. I’m asking to be present.” I hold her gaze. “I’m the material witness. I know these people. If there’s a reaction, I’ll see it faster than anyone else in that room.”