He licked his lips, slumping in the chair. “You can’t do this. You can’t—this is illegal.” His eyes darted to the door as if it might open and save him. It wouldn’t. This wasn’t a movie. There were no sirens. No hero.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my most recent burner phone, the one Caleb had handed to me with his customary sneer of disapproval. His tone on that word—”kill”—had been clipped at the end, and I replayed it enough times to map the cadence.
No one else spoke to me the way he did, direct and unfiltered, without calculation or fear, as if I was something he could dismiss instead of something that could end him, and I let him because he was safe from me.
I opened the folder he’d sent in preparation for tonight. Photos. Names. Ages. Lines of text from chats Neil Langston hadimagined were private. I angled the screen toward him, and his face drained, his lying eyes staring up at me with horror.
“That’s not mine?—”
“Shut up.”
I scrolled so he could see everything, and there was desperation in his gaze.
“Your name is on the accounts. Your face is on the footage. The last kid you met hasn’t been seen since.” I pressed a button to record. “Tell me about Tyler Bishop, reverend. Blond hair, blue eyes, foster kid sponsored by your church, which fuck, that’s kinda arrogant to have it close to home, right?”
His breath hitched. He started to cry. Not real crying. Not grief. Just panic leaking from a body that finally understood the consequences.
“I didn’t take him. I just talked to him, gave him God’s words and comfort. I just?—”
“Stop,” I said.
He did. Immediately. Good.
I set the phone down on the table, face-up, still recording, so he could see the timer I’d started. Not for him. For me.
I’d given myself twenty minutes to get what Alejandro and Caleb had asked for. Names and locations, anything that could get a team to the right place before a door closed and a child disappeared forever.
“You’re going to tell me about any other child you had contact with,” I said. “Not vague. Not ‘I heard.’ I need addresses. Rooms. Landmarks. Names. Vehicles. Everything.”
He shook his head again, but it was weaker now, “I’m a man of God! I?—”
I stabbed him again because fuck that noise, and listened as his scream filled the room, echoed a little, and then fell to nothing but sobs. His cricothyroid muscle would soon be shredded, and his screams would be nothing as loud as theywere now. I’d classified both kinds of screams, and they told me different things.
“I don’t know addresses,” he choked. “I just… I just get messages. Drop points. I don’t… I don’t go?—”
“You think you don’t know,” I said quietly. “But then you’re going to remember.”
His gaze flicked to the drain. I stepped back and walked a slow circle around him. Let him feel the room. The concrete. The lack of windows. The soft drip of water somewhere behind the wall. Every sound was amplified when you couldn’t move.
The Army had trained me to read men under pressure in a whole load of new ways.
Military prison had taught me what pressure felt like when there was no relief.
Private work after that had taught me how easy it was to turn a person into a problem and then remove the difficulty.
“Who do you work with?” I asked.
He swallowed hard. “No one. It’s not like that.”
“Itislike that.” I stopped behind him, my mouth near his ear. “There’s always someone above. Someone who collects. Someone who organizes. You don’t just wander into a network like this by accident, or are you saying you’re in charge?”
“No! Fuck no! I’m just… I’m nothing.”
“You’re right.”
His shoulders shook. “Please. I’ll—I’ll give you money. Whatever you want. I’ll disappear.”
“Money doesn’t fix what you are,” I said.
