"No." "I've got probable cause to detain you until I determine what that is." "You don't. You have a hunch and a badge. Those aren't the same thing, and you know it."
He reached for her arm, not violently, but the flat, procedural grip of a man used to people complying the moment contact was made. She didn't fight it, but she didn't help either, and the packet slipped between them in the scuffle, hit the asphalt, skidded a foot, and came to rest face up in the sun. For a moment nobody moved. Then Kessler crouched down and picked it up himself. He turned it over slowly, this time without her hands in the way.
The seal caught the light, a deep, unbroken red, pressed into shape by something that hadn't been improvised. He'd seen a seal like this once before, years ago, holding a subpoena he'd been ordered to deliver personally because nobody trusted it to the regular mail. He remembered how careful everyone had been with that one. How many hands it passed through, and how none of them touched the seal itself. The memory didn't make him careful now, it made him angrier.
"You want to tell me why you've got something like this riding around in a backpack instead of a courier lockbox?" "Because I was told to hand-deliver it myself." "Told by who?" "Someone whose name you're not going to get from me in a parking lot." He looked at Rendon, then at the small crowd.
He looked back at the packet in his hand. Someone was building a case against him. He'd felt it for weeks. And this, whatever it was, might be his only chance to see it before it was too late to stop it. He held the packet up to the light, studying the seal the way a man studies a lock he's already decided to break.
"Last chance," he said. "Tell me what's inside, or I find out myself." By the time Kessler dragged her toward the hood of her own car, the crowd near the side entrance had grown to eight. Nobody moved to help. A security guard from the building's front desk stood in the doorway with his radio in his hand and didn't lift it.
Phone stayed half raised, never fully. Nobody wanted to be the first. "Sarge." Rendon again, closer this time. "This isn't—we don't have grounds for this."
"We have grounds for whatever I say we have grounds for." Kessler didn't look at him. He was looking at Renata, at the packet in his own hand, at the way she hadn't made a sound when her shoulder hit the hood. "You want to keep telling me my job, or you want to write the report?" Rendon went quiet.