He shifted again, favoring his left side.
"Your official phone was clean," he said. "No calls to Michigan. No calls to anyone suspicious. No patterns that raised flags. You were careful. Professional. You knew your calls were logged, so you didn't use that phone for anything that mattered."
Winthrow swallowed.
"That's when she knew," Joe said. "Because the absence of calls was the tell. Everyone else on the task force had normal patterns. Personal calls. Family. Friends. The occasional wrong number. But yours? Too clean. Like you were scrubbing it. Like you were making sure it stayed pristine."
He paused.
"So she started looking at what you didn't want anyone to see."
The room was silent except for the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
"She pulled your travel vouchers," Joe said. "Federal employees file them for reimbursement. You know that. Gas receipts. Toll receipts. Parking stubs. Meal per diems. Every trip documented, every mile accounted for."
Winthrow's knuckles were white on the purse strap.
"She mapped your movements," Joe continued. "Every trip. Every stop. Every deviation from your normal routes. And she found something interesting. You made a lot of stops. Short stops. Places that didn't make sense unless you were making calls."
He watched her.
"Pay phones," he said. "Gas stations. Rest stops. Highway plazas. She cross-referenced your receipts with phone company records. Long-distance calls from public phones along your routes. Calls to northern Michigan. Always when you were traveling. Always when you had an excuse to be somewhere else."
Winthrow's breathing was shallow now.
"She matched the times," Joe said. "Your toll receipts showing when you passed through. Gas station timestamps. Parking garage tickets. And phone records showing calls made from pay phones near those locations, within minutes of when you were there."
He leaned back slightly.
"But you were smart," he said. "You didn't use the same pay phone twice. You spread them out. Different rest stops. Different gas stations. Different towns. That's good tradecraft. That's what someone with training would do."
Winthrow stared at him.
"She even found witnesses," Joe said. "Gas station attendants who remembered a woman in a business suit using the pay phone. Toll booth operators who saw your car. Security footage from a highway rest stop showing you walking to the phone bank."
He watched her.
"And then she did something brilliant," he said. "She didn't just look at the calls you made. She looked at the calls you didn'tmake. The gaps. The times when the task force was moving and there were no calls. And she realized those were the times when you were in the office. When you couldn't slip away. When you had to sit there and pretend to be part of the team while Kinsman operated blind."
Winthrow's shoulders sagged slightly.
He leaned forward again.
"She built a case," he said. “With evidence and a boatload of documentation. With a timeline so tight that no jury in the world would doubt it."
Silence settled into the room.
Winthrow stared at the floor.
Joe studied her for a moment. “Why?” he asked.
She glanced around the apartment. At the art. At the furniture. At the view of the river, the lights reflecting on the water like scattered diamonds.
"Anger," she said quietly. "Jealousy. Greed.” She shrugged her shoulders as if she had just explained a trivial mistake. “I worked just as hard," she said. "Harder, maybe. I put in the hours. I made the sacrifices. And I watched people get promoted while I stayed where I was. I watched them get the assignments that mattered while I got the paperwork."
Her voice was bitter now.
“I just wanted leverage,” she said. “I wanted something that would give me power."
