Chapter Seven
Want to Explain That
Captain Richard Hale pointed at the package the way a man points at a stain he expects someone else to clean up.
"Want to explain that?"
Malcolm did not answer immediately. He was looking at the seal.
The small red tag hung from the secondary zipper pull, bright against the black shell, its locking tooth seated exactly where he had left it that morning in Washington. Number 81427. He had threaded it through the pull himself and photographed it before handing the bag to the ticket agent. The photograph was timestamped. The number was logged in his notebook. The seal was unbroken.
"You hear me?" Hale said.
Malcolm raised his eyes slowly, the way a man surfaces from deep water, and looked at the captain for the first time since entering the room.
Hale was fifty three and carried every year in his midsection. The tan airport police uniform strained across a heavy frame. Gray had begun at his temples and spread into sideburns that needed trimming. His badge caught the fluorescent light. A radio sat on one shoulder, crackling softly with dispatch chatter, and gold captain bars gleamed at his collar. He had the posture of a man accustomed to rooms bending toward him. This one was not.
"I'm talking to you," Hale said.
Malcolm glanced at the package, then back at Hale, and said nothing. Silence was a tool he had sharpened over twenty years, and he wielded it now the way a surgeon wields a scalpel, with precision and without hurry.
Hale's jaw worked. He was not used to being ignored by people in interview chairs. The reinforced chair, the bolted floor, the glass walls, all of it was stagecraft designed to make the seated man feel small, and the seated man was ruining the effect by looking profoundly unbothered.
Behind Hale, Officer Brent Collins shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Collins was forty five, muscular, white, his black patrol uniform crisp and new looking. He had escorted Malcolm from baggage claim with professional courtesy, and he had not met Malcolm's eyes once during the walk. He was not meeting them now either. His gaze stayed fixed on the stainless steel table, on the package, on anything that was not the man in the chair.
Malcolm noticed. He noticed everything. It was the first thing his training had taught him.
"You came off Flight 284," Hale said, "with nearly two kilos of suspected narcotics in your luggage."
Malcolm remained still.
"You can sit there looking important all day," Hale continued, his voice rising a notch. "It doesn't change what we found."
At the word found, something flickered in Collins's expression, there and gone so fast Malcolm might have imagined it. He had not imagined it. Twenty years of watching faces had taught him the difference between a twitch and a tell.
Malcolm finally spoke. His voice was low and even, the kind of voice that made rooms quieter rather than louder.
"Who found it?"
Hale frowned. "What?"
"The package." Malcolm nodded toward the table without looking at it. "Who physically found it?"
The question landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Hale glanced toward Collins, and Collins's throat moved in a swallow that was audible in the glass box.
"I did," Collins said quietly.
Malcolm nodded once, slowly, as if the answer had confirmed something rather than revealed it. He leaned back in the reinforced chair, which did not lean, and folded his hands in his lap.
"Where?" he asked.
Hale stepped forward. "What kind of question is that?"
"A simple one," Malcolm said. "Where was the suitcase when Officer Collins opened it?"
Collins hesitated. The hesitation was brief, a fraction of a second, but in a room this quiet it sounded like a shout.
"Secondary inspection," Collins said.
"Which room?"
Hale's face reddened. "You don't get to interrogate us."
Malcolm looked at him with an expression of mild curiosity, the way a scientist regards an unexpected result. "I asked a simple question."
"You should be thinking about yourself."
"I am." Malcolm's gaze drifted back to the seal, hanging red and unbroken from the zipper pull. "I am thinking about it very carefully."
Hale leaned closer, both palms flat on the steel table, looming over the package. "You know what possession at this quantity means?"
Malcolm's expression did not change. "I know what possession means."
"Then confess while you still have room to cooperate."
The word confess hung in the air between them, heavy and presumptuous. Malcolm looked at the captain for a long moment, and in that look there was no fear and no anger, only a kind of deep professional interest, the way a mechanic looks at an engine that is making a noise it should not make.