with the procedural correctness he had denied to others. He hired a lawyer who argued that he had never personally planted evidence, that he had merely demanded results, and Reyes answered that argument in a press conference with a single sentence that the newspapers quoted for days: "A captain who tells his officers that he does not care how they get results has told them everything they need to know."
O'Grady, meanwhile, sat in federal detention, and his lawyer tried everything. He tried to argue that the video was inadmissible because it had been recorded without a warrant. He tried to argue that the Bureau's covert system in Cynthia's rental car constituted surveillance of a private citizen. He tried to argue that the footage had been altered, that it was, as O'Grady had shouted in the interrogation room, doctored trash. The judge, a federal judge with a reputation for impatience with theatrics, ruled on each motion in turn, and each ruling went against O'Grady. The car system was lawful, the judge wrote, because Cynthia was the owner of the vehicle for the purposes of the rental, because she had consented to the Bureau's system as part of her security arrangements, and because the system recorded the interior of her own car, not a private home or a private conversation to which she was not a party. The cryptographic hash, verified by Bureau technicians and by an independent expert, proved the footage was authentic and unaltered. The satellite uplink, with its real-time transmission to Quantico, proved it could not have been edited after the fact without breaking the chain.
In a deposition, O'Grady looked Cynthia's lawyer, and then Cynthia herself, in the eye and denied everything again. He denied planting the bag. He denied lying about the seat. He denied offering a deal in the interrogation room. He denied telling Doyle that the drugs had been in plain view. He said the video showed a different officer, or a trick of the light, or a misunderstanding of what his hand had been doing in his pocket. The prosecutor, Reyes, did not raise his voice. He simply played the video again, on a monitor in the deposition room, and then he asked O'Grady one question.
"Officer O'Grady, you have now watched yourself, in high definition, take a bag from your own pocket and place it under the driver's seat. You have just told us, under oath, that you did not do that. Do you understand that this denial, made after seeing the evidence, will be presented to a jury as consciousness of guilt?"