We came up out of the tunnels into a night that had cooled while we’d been underground. The dock district was transformed—patrol cars lining the street, blue and red lights sweeping across the old brick buildings, a transport bus idling at the curb while officers loaded detained spectators in groups of four and five.
Vic Caruso was in a patrol car near the loading dock, cuffed and silent. He looked old in the back seat. Old and tired and smaller than he’d seemed in Dre’s photographs, where he’d been leaning on the ropes like a man who owned the ring and everyone in it. He saw me looking and held my gaze for a long moment. Not defiant, not defeated, but measuring. Then he turned away, and I kept walking.
The short man with the scar along his jaw was in a second car. He was mad as a hornet. His left eye was swollen shut and already going purple, and unlike Caruso, he was talking, not to the officers but to himself, a low rapid mutter I couldn’t make out through the glass. His eyes were moving, scanning, calculating even now. A man looking for exits that didn’t exist anymore.
Jack was at the command post near the loading dock—a folding table with a radio, a clipboard, and a map of the tunnel network that was already being updated with the chambers I’d documented. He looked up when I walked over, and his eyes moved across my face, my hands, my body, checking without checking, making sure I was whole.
I touched his arm. He caught my hand for one second, then let go and went back to work.
“Transport the high-value suspects to the office,” he said into the radio. “Separate holding. Put Vic Caruso and Demetri Kallas next door to each other. Give them a chance to see each other but not talk.”
“Who’s Demetri Kallas?” I asked.
“The short one with the scar along his jaw. We ran him.” He looked at me. “Greek national. Two priors in New York for aggravated assault.”
He turned to Doug, who’d come down from the van with Margot under his arm, picking his way through the organized chaos of the dock district like a teenager who’d wandered onto a movie set and was trying not to touch the props.
“The flash drive from Dre’s lockbox,” Jack said. “Where are we?”
“It was a pre-encrypted drive. Margot and I have been a little busy tonight, but it shouldn’t take long to crack.” Doug glanced at the tunnel entrance, then back at Jack.
“Then you and Margot get loaded up. I want this operation back at the sheriff’s office. Colburn can stay here and keep the investigation and processing moving. Time is of the essence. Let’s move.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sheriff’s office after midnight had a different pulse than the one I knew during daylight hours. The fluorescent lights hummed the same frequency, the coffee maker gurgled the same burnt brew, but the air was charged. It was tight with adrenaline and the controlled urgency of people who understood that the clock was running and sleep was something that happened to other people.
Jack had turned the building into a machine.
Demetri Kallas was in interview room one. Vic Caruso was in interview room two. Jack had them walked down the same corridor a few seconds apart, close enough that they entered their rooms at almost the same time. Vic looked at Kallas nervously, but Kallas never acknowledged Vic was there. That was the game, and Jack had been playing it before either of them sat down.
I stood behind the observation glass and watched Kallas sit behind the interrogation table like it was his living room.
No fidgeting, no scanning the room, no working the cuffs or testing the table bolt. He sat with his hands flat on the metal surface and his eyes fixed on the far wall. The stillness coming off him wasn’t anxiety or resignation. It was discipline. The practiced, professional stillness of a man who had been in rooms like this before and understood that silence was a weapon and he intended to use it.
Jack went in alone. He sat down across from Kallas and opened a folder. He didn’t speak. He let the silence do what silence did in small rooms with bright lights—expand, press, fill every corner until the air itself felt heavy with everything that wasn’t being said. He laid photographs on the table, one at a time, faceup. The tunnels. The ring. Close-ups of the bullet wounds in the back of Dre’s and T-Bone’s heads. Kallas at the tunnel entrance with his arms crossed. Jack didn’t narrate them. He didn’t explain. He just set them down and waited.
Kallas looked at the photographs the way a man looks at a menu in a language he doesn’t speak. Flat disinterest.
“Lawyer,” he said.
Jack gathered the photographs, closed the folder, and stood. He walked out without a word. The whole thing lasted ninety seconds.
Jack found me in the corridor. “He’s Stavros’s man to the bone. He’s willing to go down with the ship.”
“You can see it.” Something about the way Kallas held himself reminded me of the bodies I worked on, men who’d been hard in life and carried that hardness into death, their muscles locked even after the rigor passed, as if the discipline had become structural. “He’s not going to give you anything.”
“He already gave me something.” Jack’s mouth curved, barely. “He didn’t ask what he was being charged with. A man who doesn’t know why he’s in trouble asks questions. A man who knows exactly what he’s done sits still and calls his lawyer.”
He headed for interview room two, and I moved to the other room to look through the observation glass.
Martinez was already inside with Vic, leaning against the wall by the door with his arms crossed and one ankle hooked over the other. It was a performance, and a good one. Everything Martinez did in an interview room was calibrated to keep the subject focused on Jack while he read them from the periphery.
Vic looked up when Jack walked in. No surprise in his face. No pretense of confusion. Whatever game they’d been playing across boxing rings and crime scenes for the past week, Vic understood that this was where it ended. Not with gloves and bravado but with a table and a folder and the acoustics of a room designed to make every word feel permanent.
“Vic,” Jack said, sitting down.
“Yeah.” Vic’s voice was rough, forty years of cigarettes and ringside shouting. He looked smaller in here than when he’d been in the ring, as if the fluorescent light was doing what age and gravity hadn’t quite finished. His hands were clasped on the table, and I could see the old scar tissue across his knuckles.
