Well, fuck. Suddenly, nothing was more important than getting back to Atlanta and having this big talk with Ford.
After what had to be half of a day, Agent Silva— sorry,Special Agent in ChargeSilva— finally walked into the small interrogation room they had me in.
His smile was sharp. His presence took up the entire room. The more I looked at him, the more I could see bits of Keller in there. The nose, for one.
I was so pissed, I was having a hard time keeping my cool.
He took a seat, placing a tablet and a bunch of file folders down on the corner of the table. The files looked old and well gone through.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
“I don’t care about you or your little four-man vigilante group that somehow roped an agent into helping you.” His face gave nothing away, but the air shifted around me. It became hard to breathe. “But Icancare. I can make it my top priority to charge you with stalking and harassment, for starters. Add on interfering with a federal case. Your friend in the other roomcould be charged with hacking into a federal agent’s security system. Not to mention all the charges I can bring down on Ford Priestley.”
“You know he’s innocent,” I said, glaring at him.
“I do, but it doesn’t mean I can’t use what he did do to keep him tangled up in the system for a while.” He studied me sharply. “I’m not sure of your connection to him or my son, but I have a feeling it goes beyond some lame internet sleuths meeting in a chat room trying to prove how law enforcement can’t do their jobs.”
Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was certain he didn’t seem to know our connection to Reed or the rest of the team, otherwise, he would have used that against me too.
I slouched back and stared at him blankly. “What’s your price?”
“I think you know my price,” he said as he pulled the stack of folders in front of him. “You walk out of here free and clear. Your friends walk out of here free and clear.”
“And Ford Priestley?” I gave him a dead stare. My question gave away enough, I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of seeing how much Ford meant to me written on my face.
“Free and clear… after some interrogation. It’s the FBI, after all. I have to have a record of the details.”
Imagining Ford having to sit in a room like this for hours, stressing about what was going to happen, made me want to snap. I had to remind myself that I couldn’t choke a Federal Agent.
“He’s in the Atlanta office right now.” He eyed me in a way that made me almost flinch. “Ford Priestley turned himself in, and he’s waiting for me to get down there to have that interrogation. The longer—”
“All of us are clear and you wipe our names from this investigation. Me, Ford, my three buddies, and Keller.”
“Done,” he said without hesitation.
“What exactly do you want me to do?”
His eyes held mine as he slid the stack of folders across the table.
My hand was shaking as I reached for the one on top, holding my breath as I flipped it open.
36
Ford
It was over.
Holy shit. It was fucking over.
Lipton was going away for a long time. We’d turned over a mountain of evidence that even the best team of lawyers wouldn’t be able to dig him out of.
I’d spent twelve hours locked in an interrogation room. I had to give my statement, over and over again. As much as I hated it, I understood why. Hell, that was my life, being on the other side of that table. I knew the point of getting someone to repeat their story multiple times was to poke holes in it. Just like asking them the same question in three different ways was designed to trip them up.
SAIC Silva ended the interrogation saying I was “in the clear, and free to go.” I’d actually gotten quite a few handshakes and pats on the back as I made my exit.
It left me feeling… well, I wasn’t sure I could say.
I didn’t regret my decision. It wasn’t that. I guess I should have just been happy that I went out on a high note and I’d aided in taking down one of the biggest child pornography and sex trafficking rings the FBI had seen since the late eighties.
