"So, she must be selling a lot of drugs then, or making a lot of money at work."
"If you make a lot of money at work, would you risk it all to deal drugs? Why?"
Silence again. Holt started to feel the blood of embarrassment climb to his cheeks. He tilted his head down to hide it.
"Is this your typical user or dealer profile? She's a successfully employed executive, in a job requiring high security clearance, no less." Reyes waited for Holt to say something, but he didn't. There was nothing to say. "If you're not yet experienced enough to examine profiles, let's look at evidence." He flipped through the lab report. "Her clothes had zero trace of meth, or any other drug for that matter. I'd think she isn't using or dealing too much in these clothes, is she?"
Holt nodded his silent approval.
"Fingerprints report," Reyes continued to the next page of the lab report. "Not only does our lady have a whistle-clean record, not even a parking ticket, but her fingerprints were nowhere on that bag of meth. Someone else's were, though. They found a partial that doesn't match any of hers. What does that tell you?"
"She never touched the bag of drugs," Holt accepted.
"That means she wasn't lying when she was saying that. How about her meth use? What have you noticed?"
"The lab test came back positive; she had a trace of meth in her urine."
"The operative word here is 'trace.' In fact, the trace was so fine that the lab decided to do a hair-strand analysis to determine the history of drug use." Reyes pushed the lab report in front of Holt. "There is none. This lady isn't a user. It was all in the file, for you to read and consider."
"Oh. OK, but then how do you explain all this incriminating evidence? There were drugs in her car. She had drugs in her system."
"Oh, yes, because whoever is framing her is doing a thorough job. Very thorough for you, anyway — you almost sent her to prison. Not thorough enough for me. I need to see context, to understand the motive for the crime. If there is no motive, I get suspicious, and I have a lot of questions I need answered before sending someone to jail."
The small office grew silent again.
After a few minutes, Holt looked at Reyes and asked. "Lieutenant, do you think I have what it takes to do this job?"
"I think you do. These were rookie mistakes, nothing more. Remember not to jump to conclusions, always get the full context, get all your questions answered, and better let a guilty person go free than an innocent one do time."
…55
Alex sat on the cold floor of the detention cell, crouched in the far corner. There was a bed in her cell, but she could not bring herself to come near it. Occasional tears would still run down her cheeks, but she had lost the strength to continue sobbing. Memories of all kinds ran through her mind, like snapshots from movies. Her mother saying, "You will leave here with nothing, and I expect the clothes you are wearing to be returned… Oh, and don't ever come back." She rarely thought about her mother anymore, but she would have loved to be able to call her now.
Tom's voice saying, "You need to learn to trust." She had trusted him, and he'd let her down. Dr. Barnaby's desperation-filled voice, shouting, "I'll go straight to my basement, get my handgun out of my safe, and spare my wife the shame and embarrassment to see me brought to my knees and dragged in handcuffs out of our home." She had a new understanding of his anguish, seeing things through her own imprisonment experience. She was going to let him down. She was not going to be able to do anything for him, or for all those people — the dead and the wounded on Highway 98 in Florida. The enduring employees at NanoLance, going through day after day of abuse. Who knows how many more lives would be lost, out there in remote places, in foreign lands?
A loud, clattering noise brought her back to reality. Detective Holt was jingling some keys on a ring.
"You're free to go," he said, "we're dropping all charges."
She stood, unsure of her legs, afraid this was her imagination playing tricks on her brain. She stepped through the open cell door and into the main hallway.
"Are you OK to drive?" Holt asked.
She nodded.
"Your car is right across the street in our impound lot. I'll get an officer to release it to you, and you're free to go."
Forty-five minutes later, she entered her home. She kicked off her shoes and took off her clothes, leaving them on the floor where they dropped. She went straight to the kitchen and poured Martini Vermouth into a tall glass, over a handful of ice cubes, until the glass almost spilled over. She took that with her into the shower. Crouched in the tub, hot water running down over her, she took sip after sip of Vermouth and cried until her tears ran dry.
…56
Alex didn't ring the front doorbell when she arrived at Tom's house. Instead, she went around the house and into the backyard, where everyone should have been gathered by now. Everyone was, including the two most elusive of her colleagues, the aristocratic Brian Woods and the perfectly dressed Richard Ferguson.
The crowd was engaged in the typical Independence Day barbecue, gathered around the grill and the beer-filled cooler. Alex took the twelve pack of beer she was carrying straight to the cooler and grabbed a cold one for herself.
"Hey, hey," Tom cheered her arrival, "welcome! We weren't sure you'd be able to join us after all."
"Hello, Alex," Brian greeted her with a quick handshake, "great to see you."
"Hey there," Richard said and gave her a quick hug, careful not to drop Little Tom from his arms.
"Lovely to see you," Claire said, offering a smile and a warm hug. "We were worried about you."
From across the lawn, Steve just waved at her, his distance making her sad for an instant.
"Yes, it's great to see you all and to be here." She turned to Tom. "Most of all, I wanted to thank you for coming through for me and for getting me out of that hell hole."
There was a moment of silence in the group, while everyone was looking briefly at everyone else.
"Alex, well," Tom hesitated, "it wasn't me. Or any of us."
"What?" Alex blurted, voice filled with anger. "So, then, what happened?"
"Not sure. We never got to pull any strings. We were checking the facts—"
"Checking the facts?" Her anger was rising, getting the best of her. The traumatic experience of her arrest was still fresh, and so was the painful memory of Tom hanging up on her, leaving her all alone to deal with the mess she was in — because of him, because of this job. "Listen to me, and listen good," she heard herself say, "you told me during my first week with you to learn to trust. You had no business teaching me that. You need to learn to trust. You know what kind of job you're giving me to do. You preach to me about how dangerous this can get. You play the nice guy, giving me all kinds of advice on how to stay safe, yet at the first sign of trouble, you don't trust me. Instead, you abandon me. I trusted you. And you let me down. You abandoned me. You left me in jail to rot in hell.