He stepped fully into the room, pushing past the two men in dark suits as if their presence were an inconvenience he could shoulder aside. The room, which had felt small with three people in it, now felt crowded, almost airless, with six people standing and sitting around a steel table that had been built for far fewer. Miller planted his feet and pointed a finger at Carter, not at Cynthia, not at the tablet, but at the man who had dared to speak to him as an equal.
"Listen to me very carefully," Miller warned, his voice echoing in the small concrete room, bouncing off the green walls and the two-way mirror and the steel table. "I don't care if you're a senior partner at Kirkland and Ellis or the ghost of Clarence Darrow. You are interfering with an active police investigation. I will have you arrested for obstruction if you don't pack up that toy and leave my building right now."
The threat was meant to restore order. It was the kind of threat Miller had probably made before, to lawyers who arrived too early, to family members who asked too many questions, to reporters who lingered too long in the lobby. It was a threat that worked when the person hearing it needed something from the precinct, a phone call, a visit, a file, a favor. Carter needed nothing from the precinct. He stood very still, and the stillness itself seemed to answer Miller. He did not raise his voice. He did not step back. He did not even look at the finger pointed at him. He looked, instead, at the tablet in his hand, and then at Cynthia, and the brief exchange of glances between them was so calm, so practiced, that it made Miller's anger look, suddenly, like panic wearing a uniform.
James Carter did not flinch. He didn't even look at the captain for a long moment, as if Miller's outburst were a sound from another room, interesting but not relevant to the work at hand. Instead, he swiped a finger across the silver tablet, pulling up a media player interface. The screen brightened, a clean white rectangle with a simple play symbol in its center, and the light from it fell across Carter's hands and across the steel table. It was a small, ordinary gesture, the kind of gesture a man makes a dozen times a day, and in that room it landed like a verdict.
O'Grady watched the swipe with a confusion he could not hide. He had expected an argument. He had expected Carter to defend his right to be there, to cite statutes, to threaten a lawsuit, to do any of the things lawyers did when they were told to leave. He had not expected a man to ignore a captain's threat of arrest and simply prepare to press play. Doyle, by the door, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His arms were no longer crossed. His hands hung at his sides,