“No way,” Gannon said with another smile. “Way bigger.”

Jeremy looked at him. Then looked down his little street.

Gannon looked with him at the palm fronds waving there in the breeze.

“Was that Little Jorge with you?” Sergeant Jeremy said with an eye roll.

As he usually did, Gannon grinned as he thought about his young, somewhat sketchy first mate.

“No,” Gannon said, squinting. “First mate Little Jorge is still…on vacation.”

“Vacation? A young man of leisure. Very interesting.”

“Anything else I can do for you?” Gannon said. “I’d offer you a beer, but with you being on duty and all, I wouldn’t want to insult you.”

“Always thinking of others, Michael, aren’t you? That’s probably why I like you so much,” Sergeant Jeremy said after he closed his door. “Shall I expect to see you Sunday? It’s my turn for the sermon. It’s called ‘God Has a Mission for You.’ I’ll even keep it under half an hour this time, I promise.”

“Deacon,” Gannon said, blessing himself as he backed for his house, “to be present on such an auspicious occasion, I will do my level best.”

20

The too-bright cement windowless room Emerson led coast guard rescue diver Stephen Vance into was in the basement of the base’s power plant building.

Used as an emergency brig, the walk-in closet-sized room had raw cement block walls and a threadbare linoleum floor that was a pale institutional green. The curtain blocking off the cell’s back corner toilet was opaque and yellowing at the plastic edges and seemed in several spots to be coated in black mold.

Beside it in the room were only four other items: a folding table, two folding chairs and a little mirror on the wall opposite the door.

Perfect, Reyland thought, watching through the peep show one-way glass. The toilet curtain especially. Just atrocious.

Reyland smiled at the haughty expression on Emerson’s face as the two of them sat. He always loved watching the way suspects became instantly intimidated by Emerson’s six-foot-tall height and dark-haired preppy good looks. He had played varsity lacrosse at Boston College, and his resting countenance was still one of pure big-man-on-campus arrogance. The men in the unit actually called him Prep School behind his back.

Emerson had confided to Reyland at the last Christmas party that he could have joined a Wall Street bank like his brother but had chosen the Bureau instead on purpose. In his junior year, he had read a book about the way homicide cops did interrogations, how they were legally allowed to screw with and to bully people, and he finally realized what he wanted to do with his life.

He had drunkenly told Reyland that what he loved most about his job was the back-and-forth of grinding down a subject until he made him, as Emerson put it, “his soft sweet little bitch.”

Reyland smiled as he watched Emerson take out a laptop and clack it down and fold it open with slow ceremony onto the table.