He gave Marsh credit for it. Tell her I appreciate the offer, Darius said. I'll think about it. That's fair. A brief pause.
One more thing. The building management company, Hayes Global, has already been in contact with them this morning. Your position is secure regardless of any decisions you make going forward. Victoria made that explicit. I wasn't worried about my position, Darius said.
A short silence. No, I didn't think you were. Marsh sounded like he meant that. Take care of yourself today, Mr. Coleman.
Well be in touch. The call ended. Darius set the phone on the table and stared at the middle distance for a moment. Victoria Hayes had been awake before 8:00 a.m. Had already spoken to her attorney.
Had already in the hours between walking out of that lobby and this phone call, thought about him specifically, not as a detail to manage, not as a liability to contain, but as a person whose situation she was attending to. He didn't know exactly what to do with that. He stood up, folded the green blanket, put it back in the closet, and went to make eggs. The formal witness statement took place at the precinct at 2 p.m. That afternoon.
Darius sat across from Detective Okafor in a room that smelled like old coffee and institutional carpet and walked through everything again, this time for the record, this time with a recorder on the table and a transcriptionist in the corner. He told it the same way he told it at 2:00 a.m. Sequentially, factually, without editorializing. The photograph of the transfer switch had already been transferred from his phone to evidence and verified by the department's technical unit as unaltered and timestamped correctly. When he finished, Okafur leaned back in his chair and looked at his notes.
"The technical team confirms your read of the transfer switch override," Okafor said. Manual bypass consistent with someone who understood the system. Webb has confirmed Caldwell directed the sabotage and provided the technical specifications. Webb is cooperating fully. A pause.
Caldwell has not said a word since his arrest. Not one. That doesn't surprise me, Darius said. No. Okapor tapped his pen against his notepad.
What does surprise me is that Caldwell's plan was actually sophisticated enough that without several specific circumstances breaking wrong for him. It might have worked. He paused. The main thing that stopped him was a maintenance tech who took a photograph at midnight and didn't fix what he photographed, Darius said. Because the lights went out before he could.