"I have nothing to say to you without my attorney present," Cynthia stated clearly. She said it the way she had said it a hundred times to suspects in her own career, the way she had taught young agents to say it, steady and without heat. It was not a negotiation. It was a line.
"Your attorney isn't here yet," O'Grady shot back, his voice dropping to a menacing gravel. "And by the time he gets here, the deal I'm about to offer you is going to be off the table."
Cynthia allowed a small change to cross her face. She let her shoulders drop a fraction. She let her fingers tighten, just slightly, around each other. She let her eyes move from O'Grady's face to the table and back again, as if she were weighing something she did not want to weigh. It was a performance, and she knew it was a performance, but it was also a tool. O'Grady needed to believe he was breaking her, because a man who believed he was winning talked more than a man who believed he was being watched.
"What deal?" she asked, feigning a hint of nervous hesitation. Her voice was a little thinner than it had been in the holding cell. It was not fear. It was an invitation.
O'Grady took the bait. He leaned back in his chair, thinking he was breaking her, and a slow, satisfied smile spread across his face. He glanced at Doyle, as if to say, watch this, and then he turned back to Cynthia and spread his hands on the table, palms down, like a man laying out cards.
"You're a mule," he said. "I know it, you know it. Two ounces of rock is a lot of weight for a personal stash. You were moving it for somebody. Give me a name. Give me the distributor you bought it from, and I'll talk to the DA. I'll tell him you cooperated. Maybe we drop the charge down to simple possession. You do a year of probation, pay a fine, and walk away."
The offer hung in the air between them, foul and familiar. Cynthia had heard versions of it throughout her career, sometimes made in good faith by detectives trying to climb a ladder to a larger target, sometimes made in bad faith by officers trying to close a case at any cost. This was the second kind, and the difference was not subtle. A legitimate offer came with paperwork, with counsel, with a prosecutor in the room. This offer came in a room with a supposedly broken camera, from a man who had planted the evidence himself, and it required her to invent a distributor who did not exist so that he could trade her invented cooperation for a reduced charge on a crime she had not committed. It was not a lifeline. It was a trap with a softer name.