Dutton said no. She didn't ask again. She sat in silence and composed the call in her head, every word, every instruction, every reason she was going to tell Deputy Chief Marcus Hale to stand down and let this play out exactly as it was. She already knew what she was going to do. She'd known since the moment the handcuffs clicked shut.
She was going to let them finish building it. Every brick, every word, every assumption left on the record. And then she was going to walk through the door on Monday morning and own every single one of them. Hargrove City Police Department occupied a four-story building on the corner of Meridian and fifth gray concrete facade, wide glass entrance, the city seal above the doors in brushed steel. Serena had visited twice during the transition process.
She knew the layout of every floor. She knew the break room was on the second floor and the coffee machine on the left was perpetually broken and the one on the right made a sound like a small animal in distress before dispensing something that technically qualified as coffee. She knew that the holding area was on the ground floor east wing behind the booking desk and that the fluorescent light in the third cell from the left flickered every 8 to 12 seconds because the maintenance request for it had been submitted 14 months ago and still hadn't been addressed. She knew all of this. She sat in the back of Dutton's patrol car, cold, damp wrists cuffed behind her, the broken air conditioning pumping the same recycled cold air in slow useless circles.
And she said nothing for the entire 11-minute drive. Dutton talked to Webb about a football game. Webb responded in one-syllable answers and looked out the window and wrote two more lines in his notebook at a red light when he thought Dutton wasn't watching. The booking process took 40 minutes. Fingerprints, photograph, personal property logged in a plastic bag.
Her pool bag had been retrieved from the yard, so the bag contained her phone, her keys, her wallet, a pair of sandals, and a paperback novel she'd been carrying for 3 weeks without opening. The booking officer, a heavy-set man named Sergeant Pete Navarro, processed her with professional efficiency. His eyes moving over her face with the particular expression of someone trying to locate a memory that keeps sliding away. He'd seen her photo. He just didn't know where.
Dutton filed his report at the desk nearest the window. His posture was relaxed, his handwriting quick and certain, the posture of a man who had done this before and expected it to resolve the same way it always did. He used words like uncooperative and refused to provide identification and escalating behavior that Serena reading upside down for 3 seconds as she was walked past, noted and filed away in the same part of her mind that stored everything. Webb sat at the adjacent desk and wrote his own report. His handwriting was slower.
He crossed out one word and replaced it with another. He sat back, read what he'd written, crossed out a second word. He looked uncomfortable in the way of someone doing a thing they know is insufficient, but doing it as well as they can anyway. Serena was placed in the third holding room on the left. The light flickered every 8 to 12 seconds, exactly as she'd expected.
She sat on the bench with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap, and she waited. She did not ask for a phone call, did not ask for a lawyer, did not ask for anything. Two hours passed. Detective Imani Rhodes had been at her desk on the second floor reviewing case files when the internal announcement came through the formal one with the photo distributed to all senior staff ahead of Monday's introduction. She'd read it twice, looked at the photo, and gone back to her files.
That had been last Wednesday. Now it was Saturday, and she was in on a weekend follow-up, and she happened to walk past the holding area and happened to glance through the narrow window in the door of room three, the one with the flickering light, and she stopped walking. She stood at that window for four full seconds. Then she turned around and walked very quickly to the booking desk, where Dutton was finishing his report with the self-satisfied air of a man who'd had a productive morning. Dutton.