Right. Okapor looked at him with the steady, patient expression of a man who had been doing this work long enough to find certain kinds of irony deeply satisfying. Caldwell killed the lights to stop you from resetting the switch, which he needed running to delete the evidence. Which means he stopped himself. He built a plan with too many pieces.
Darius said the more pieces, the more that can go wrong. Okapor wrote something down. You said that last night, too. It's true every time. Okapor almost smiled, closed his notepad.
You're free to go, Mr. Coleman. We'll be in touch if we need anything further. The trial date, if it goes to trial, and I believe it will, is likely 12 to 18 months out. You'll receive formal notification.
Darius stood up. Detective, he said. The elevator break modification. Did the technical team confirm it? Okaphor held his gaze for a moment.
Yes, so it wasn't meant to release. It was not a pause. Webb confirmed that as well. He states he didn't know that specific detail of Caldwell's plan that Caldwell told him the elevator would release on its own during a power cycle. Webb believed you'd be trapped and uncomfortable, not Okafor stopped.
Webb is either telling the truth or he's very good at performing regret. In my experience, real regret sounds different from performed regret. What did his sound like? Okaphor picked up his notepad. Real, he said, and walked out.
Darius sat back down for a moment after Okaphor left. Not because he needed to, just because the room was quiet and he needed one minute of quiet before he went back out into the day. The elevator break. He had known it since the moment Okaphor's team confirmed it. Had known it really since the sound of the break engaging in the dark car.
That sound that was slightly wrong, slightly too final. But knowing a thing intellectually and sitting in a police interview room while a detective confirms it are different experiences. Someone had modified a break mechanisms in a building where Darius worked. Had calculated that he might be in that building that night, not targeting him, not knowing his name, just knowing that a maintenance tech would respond to an emergency call during a major storm, had decided that was acceptable. He thought about that for exactly 60 seconds.
Then he stood up and left. The parking lot outside the precinct was ordinary in the specific way that ordinary things are startling after extraordinary events. Cars, asphalt, afternoon light, people moving through their regular Tuesday with no awareness of what had happened 16 floors up in a glass tower the previous night. He stood beside his truck and breathed the outside air for a moment. His phone buzzed.