“Understood, Director,” Carter said, and Cynthia could hear him already moving, already shifting into the mode of a man executing an order he understood completely. “I'll be on the Bureau's Gulfstream in twenty minutes. Estimated time to your location is three hours. Do not let them interrogate you.”
“Oh, I'm going to let them try,” Cynthia said, and the smile widened slightly, though her voice remained calm and controlled. “I'll see you soon, Jim.”
She hung up the phone and turned back to O'Grady, replacing the receiver with a deliberate, unhurried motion. O'Grady pushed off the wall, still smirking, still confident, still believing he was in control of the night.
“My lawyer is on his way,” Cynthia said. “He's coming from out of town.”
O'Grady laughed, the same cruel, barking laugh he had used on the highway. “Out of town? Must be expensive. Let's see if he can get you out of ten to fifteen years in state lockup. Come on. We're going to interrogation room four.”
Cynthia followed him down the corridor, her socks silent on the linoleum, her blazer still damp, her mind already ahead of him, already in the room where he would try to coerce a confession and where he would, without knowing it, give her everything she needed.
The plastic partition between the front and back seats of the cruiser was scratched and yellowed, a dull barrier that seemed to hold in the smell of old coffee, wet wool, and disinfectant that never quite reached the places it was supposed to clean. Cynthia Holloway sat with her back straight despite the cuffs biting into her wrists, despite the angle at which her shoulders had been forced, despite the rain still clinging to her hair and running in thin, cold lines down the back of her neck. She did not lean against the door. She did not slump. She kept her knees together, her feet flat on the rubber mat, and her eyes on the back of Officer Thomas O'Grady's head, because she had learned a long time ago that a person who looks away in a moment like this is a person who is already preparing to forget what happened.
Up front, O'Grady drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to the rhythm of the windshield wipers. It was a careless, tuneless beat, the kind a man makes when he thinks the work is done and the rest of the night will belong to him. The wipers swept, paused, swept again, and his fingers followed, tapping out a small private celebration against the worn leather of the wheel. Beside him, Officer Kevin Doyle sat with his arms folded, his head tipped back against the headrest, his eyes on the rain.