Yesterday. Adrian.
I don't raise it. Not here. Not yet.
She adjusts her blazer. Crosses her legs. Her professional armor is holding, seams tight. Then her fingers drift to her collar. Find the chain and close around the medal. Her thumb traces the edge of St. Christopher's profile while her coffee cools on the table in front of her.
I start counting. One. Two. Three.
She is still holding it when Kade opens his folder and looks around the table. "We good?"
Vanessa pulls the presentation onto the wall-mounted screens. "We're good."
Angelina's hand drops. Both palms flatten against her thighs.
Vanessa's first slide fills the screens. Faces. Dates. Cities.
"Four separate jurisdictions," Vanessa starts, "four separate FBI field offices, and not one of them thought to cross-reference cause of death—"
I should be looking at the screens.
But I watch her hands instead. They are my surveillance feed now, the only data that matters in a room full of monitors. Seven years of watching through cameras, and now she is close enough that I can see the chain catch light when she breathes.
She belongs here.
She is in danger.
Both things pull in the same direction. Towards me.
Vanessa's fingers fly, and the first photo fills the left monitor.
"Judge Margaret Hensley. Houston. Age fifty-one. Found dead in her chambers 6 weeks ago ago. Ruled heart attack."
The photo shifts. Another face, older. "Judge Nathan Cross. Phoenix. Sixty-one. Cardiac event during morning coffee. Also ruled natural."
A third image. "Judge Elaine Patterson. Portland. Fifty-three. Dead in her hotel room after a conference. Same conclusion."
Vanessa flips to a fourth photo. "Judge Robert Tannenbaum. Denver. Fifty-eight. Collapsed in his home office two weeks ago. Wife found him the next morning."
Her hand moves, arranging all four faces side by side on the screen. "Four federal judges across four states. All within the past six weeks. All cardiac events. All ruled natural causes."
Angelina's pen comes out. Black ink, thin barrel, the one that she seems to always have on her. She clicks it open against her notepad with one swift motion.
"All presided over trafficking cases," Vanessa continues, her rhythm accelerating the way it does when her brain outpaces her mouth. "Same financial network. So, when I saw the pattern, because nobody else bothered to cross-reference state lines, I pulled case records. The common thread is trafficking prosecutions tied to offshore accounts, shell corporations, shipping manifests. Same money trail, different faces."
Angelina writes. Three clean lines, numbered. Her pen doesn't stop.
"And the flowers. There are variable timelines on the flowers." Vanessa clicks to another slide. Delivery receipts, timestamps, locations. "Three victims received belladonna arrangements between six days and three weeks before death. The last one didn't receive flowers, or at least nothing documented. Timing's inconsistent. Could be targeting preference, could be opportunity, could be—"
"Confidence level." Angelina does not look up from her notes. "On the pattern attribution. What's your statistical baseline for distinguishing correlation from causation?"
Vanessa blinks. Then grins. "I like her."
"Ninety-two percent confidence." Vanessa pulls up another screen. "Accounting for age, health history, case overlap, and geographic distribution. Baseline cardiac death rate for this demographic is point-zero-three-nine percent annually. We're seeing ten times that rate concentrated in judges handling linked cases. That's not chance."
Angelina underlines something. "Jurisdictional gaps? What are you missing?"
"Federal cases only," Vanessa admits. "State courts handle trafficking too, but the data's fragmented. Different reporting standards. I can't get clean cross-state analysis without another forty hours of pulling records."
"And the FBI field offices—"