The door closed behind them with a sound that was heavier than a door should make, a flat metallic thud that seemed to seal the small room off from the rest of the precinct. Interrogation room four was exactly as Cynthia Holloway had expected it to be, and the familiarity of it steadied her more than anything else that night had. It was a small, windowless box painted in a nauseating shade of institutional green, the kind of green that had been chosen decades ago because it was cheap and because it showed nothing, not dirt, not wear, not time. A heavy steel table was bolted to the floor in the center of the room, flanked by three uncomfortable metal chairs. A large two-way mirror dominated the right wall, its surface dark and reflective, giving back a dim version of the room and of the people inside it. Cynthia knew, without needing to be told, that someone could be standing on the other side of that glass watching, or that no one was, and that either possibility served the same purpose. The room was designed to make a person feel observed and alone at the same time.
O'Grady gestured toward the chair on the side facing the mirror. He did not pull it out for her. He pointed with two fingers, casual and dismissive, as if she were an object to be placed.
"Sit there," he said.
Cynthia sat. The chair was cold through her blazer. The steel table was cold under her forearms when she rested them lightly upon it, and she kept her hands visible, her fingers loosely interlaced, her breathing even. She did not look at the mirror for long. She looked instead at the room itself, at the scuffed floor, at the bolt heads in the table legs, at the faint stain on the ceiling where water had once leaked through. She was cataloguing everything, the way she had been trained to do twenty-eight years ago on her first beat in Atlanta, the way she still did now, even as director, even in socks, even with her shoelaces and belt taken from her at booking. A room told a story if you let it. This room told her that it had heard many confessions, true and false, and that it did not care which kind they were.
O'Grady took the seat opposite her. He dragged his chair forward until his knees almost touched the underside of the table, and he settled his weight into it with the confidence of a man who believed the room belonged to him. Officer Doyle stood by the