"Downtown, then," she murmured.
"Downtown," Jada agreed, calm as ever, watching the familiar streets begin to slide past the window. "Let them take us all the way into the record."
Chapter 16: The Purse
The booking area smelled of floor cleaner, old coffee, and wet concrete from the rain still clinging to everyone's shoes. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, hard and white, and the clock above the intake desk read just after eleven on a Friday night in Charleston. Jada Monroe stood where she had been told to stand, hands cuffed behind her back, wrists aching where the metal had been cinched too tight at the Copper Lantern. Beside her, Jayla Monroe stood in the same posture, box braids damp at the ends, her expression calm in the way it had been calm all evening, which was not the same as untroubled.
Sergeant Brett Sutter did the talking. He was out of uniform in the sense that he was off duty, and in uniform in every way that mattered to the room, dark navy, badge clipped, whiskey still on his breath when he leaned toward the desk. Officer Nathan Pryce stood at his shoulder holding Jada's purse by its strap like it was evidence and an inconvenience at once. Officer Tyler Boone lingered near the wall, arms folded, watching the sisters as if daring either of them to raise her voice.
Desk Sergeant Carol Boudreaux listened without writing for a long moment. She was a broad-shouldered woman in her fifties with gray threaded through short hair and reading glasses pushed up on her head. She had the stillness of someone who had heard every version of a Friday night story and had learned to hear the parts that did not fit. When Sutter finished with disorderly conduct, resisting, and a gesture toward the bar that made both women sound like a brawl, she looked past him.
"Names," she said.
Jada gave hers, spelled it, and gave her date of birth. Jayla did the same. Boudreaux typed slowly, then stopped.
"You took their identification?" she asked Sutter.
"They were noncompliant," he said. "We secured the scene."
"That is not what I asked."
Pryce shifted the purse from one hand to the other. The strap creaked. Something inside it slid and settled with a soft, solid sound that Jada knew by heart, the weight of a credential case against a phone and keys.
Boudreaux noticed the purse for the first time, or perhaps she had been noticing it all along and waiting for the story to finish hanging itself. "Whose is that?"
"Mine," Jada said. "He has been carrying it since the bar. No one has asked to search it, and I have not consented to a search."
"I am not searching anything yet," Boudreaux said, and there was a warning in it that was not aimed at Jada. She held out her hand to Pryce. "Give it to me."
Pryce hesitated. Sutter gave a small shake of his head that most people would have missed. Boudreaux did not miss it. Her hand stayed out, palm up, until Pryce crossed the two steps and laid the strap across it. She set the purse on the desk between the keyboard and the intake forms, directly in front of her, where the booking camera could see it.
"For the record," she said, louder, to the room and to the camera, "I am opening this bag at the owner's direction for identification only, in her presence." She looked at Jada. "Is that right?"
"Yes," Jada said. "My identification is in the front pocket. Please take it out."
Boudreaux unzipped the front pocket first. Her fingers found the case at once. It was black, worn at the corners, heavier than a wallet. She drew it out and laid it flat, and for one second she did not open it, as if she already understood that whatever was inside would change the temperature of the room.
She opened it.
Gold caught the fluorescent light. A federal badge, and beside it, credentials with Jada's photograph, her name, and the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
No one spoke. The printer in the corner clicked and went silent. Boone uncrossed his arms.
Boudreaux read the credential twice, top to bottom, the way a careful person reads a warrant. Then she looked up at Jada, really looked, taking in the cuffs, the tight set of her shoulders, the rain on her blouse from the walk between the car and the door.
"Special Agent Monroe," she said.
"Yes, ma'am," Jada said.
"And your sister?"
"Also a special agent," Jayla said quietly. "My credentials were in my jacket at the bar. My case fell on the floor when they cuffed us. He kicked it away."
Boudreaux turned her head, very slowly, toward Sutter. The whiskey smell seemed suddenly to belong to the whole story, and none of it was good.