"Careful men don't kidnap federal prosecutors."
"Careful men do desperate things when their brothers are in prison."
She doesn't respond. I take that as the closest thing to understanding she's going to offer.
I lock both deadbolts from the outside with the only key. Her shoes and coat are still in the van. The drive to the city takes just under two hours, long enough to think, which is exactly what I don't want to do. I think anyway. About Sofia's case, about the financial records and the phone intercepts and the cooperating witnesses who told a story that lines up with everything except what Alejandro told me. About the way she presents evidence, without spin, without emotion, laying out facts the way I lay out plastic sheeting: clean, flat, covering everything.
I think about her in my flannel shirt. About the way she eats in small deliberate bites, never rushing, as if she only eats because her body demands fuel. About the curve of her neckwhen she turns to argue a point, the way her eyes sharpen when she knows she's won, the way her mouth moves around legal terminology with the same ease I disassemble a crime scene.
I think about the fact that she saidbe carefuland that she meant it, and that I've handled corpses that weighed less than those two words.
These thoughts are contamination. In my line of work, you keep the job clean by keeping yourself clean, with no attachments, no complications, nothing sticky that traces back to you when the lights come on. Sofia Navarro is the most dangerous contamination I've ever allowed into a job, and I'm letting her sit at my kitchen table and dismantle me one piece of evidence at a time because some part of me, the part I've spent fifteen years trying to kill, wants to be dismantled.
The detention center is a concrete block in lower Manhattan, utilitarian and grim in the way that all federal facilities are grim, as if the architecture itself is designed to communicate the absence of hope. I park two blocks away and walk, scanning for surveillance out of habit. If the cartel has people watching this facility, they'll see me. If they're monitoring the visitor log, they'll know I came. Both of these are risks I'm accepting because the alternative, continuing to operate on blind faith in a man who may have been lying to me for years, is no longer tenable.
The visiting room is divided by plexiglass with phones on either side. I sit in a plastic chair that's bolted to the floor and wait.
Alejandro comes through the door on the other side looking smaller than I remember. He's always been leaner than me, shorter, with our mother's face and our father's sharp eyes. In the orange jumpsuit, with the fluorescent light washing the color from his skin, he looks diminished and reduced.
He picks up his phone. I pick up mine.
"Hermano." His voice is the same, warm, familiar, the voice that called my name across playgrounds and schoolyards and the cramped rooms of apartments we shared with strangers. "You look like shit. Are you sleeping?"
"No."
"Me either. This place isn't exactly the Ritz." He tries to smile and it doesn't land. "What's going on out there? Diego told me you're working on something. Something to help."
"I have the prosecutor."
His face changes. Subtly, in the way that only someone who has known him his entire life would recognize. The warmth contracts. His eyes sharpen. For just a moment, a fraction of a second, the person looking at me through the plexiglass is not my little brother. It's someone else entirely.
"You took her? Sofia Navarro?"
"Diego's orders. She's secure. Off the grid."
"And? Is she cooperating?"
"Not yet."
"Push harder. She's tough, but everyone has a breaking point. You just have to find the leverage."
Leverage. The word sits wrong in my mouth, tastes wrong, the way food tastes wrong when you're getting sick and your body knows before your mind does.
"She showed me the evidence, Alejo.
Silence. Through the plexiglass, I watch my brother's face rearrange itself. The sharpness softens back into warmth, into the expression of a man who is hurt, confused, wrongfully accused. It's a good performance. It's always been a good performance. I just never had reason to look for the seams before.
"What evidence? Her fabricated case? Mateo, I told you, she manufactured everything."
"The financial records. The auto body shop reporting forty cars a month and servicing a fraction of that. The utility bills that don't match the revenue claims. The wire transfers to shell companies." I keep my voice low and steady. "She didn't have to fabricate anything, Alejandro. The numbers speak for themselves."
"Numbers can be manipulated."
"And the phone intercepts. Dozens of kilos delivered to a warehouse in Hunts Point. You weren't talking about auto parts."
His mouth opens and then closes. He leans back in his chair and I watch the performance flicker, the mask of innocence stuttering like a bad signal, and beneath it, for just a moment, I see what Sofia Navarro has been trying to show me.
My brother is afraid. Not of the conviction and not of prison. He is afraid of me. Of what happens when I stop believing him.
