“Good catch, Tommy,” Doyle grunted from the passenger seat, not bothering to look back at Cynthia. “Captain Miller's been riding us all month about narcotics numbers. This ought to get him off our backs.”
“Easy money, Kev,” O'Grady said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel to the rhythm of the windshield wipers. His voice was relaxed now, almost cheerful, the tension of the stop replaced by the satisfaction of a job he believed he had done well. “She practically handed it to me. Pulled her over for a swerve, saw the baggy sitting right in plain sight on the passenger seat. Didn't even try to hide it.”
In the back, Cynthia committed every word to memory. She did not need to write it down. She had spent twenty-eight years training her memory to hold exact phrasing, exact order, exact contradictions, because in a courtroom the difference between what a man said on a highway and what he said in a cruiser and what he wrote in a report was often the difference between freedom and prison. First lie, she thought, with a clarity that cut through the discomfort of the cuffs and the cold damp of her blazer. On the highway, he claimed it was under the driver's seat. Now it was on the passenger seat in plain sight. The bag had moved in his story even though it had not moved in the car, except by his own hand, and that movement would matter. She noted the time in her head, the rain on the windows, the way Doyle nodded as if he had seen the bag himself, and she stored it all away.
“She give you any trouble?” Doyle asked, glancing at the mirror but not quite meeting Cynthia's eyes in it.
“A little lip,” O'Grady scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. “Tried to pull the do you know who I am routine. Just another mule in a rented suit.”
Cynthia kept her face still. She had not pulled any routine. She had not invoked a title, a rank, or a connection. She had given him a civilian license and a rental agreement and answered his questions in short, neutral sentences. But O'Grady was already rewriting her, turning a calm, compliant woman into a difficult suspect who had tried to intimidate him, because that version of the story made his arrest sound justified and his promotion sound earned.
“Miller is going to put me up for that detective shield after this one,” O'Grady said, and there was a note of genuine excitement in his voice now, the excitement of a man who could already see the next step in his career. “I can feel it.”