“Is it true?”

“How do you know that?” I say, poking her once more with my Ruger.

She says, “Like I said. I’ve found some information on my own.”

“What else?”

“That’s all you’re getting.” Her voice now growing defiant. “Captain Cornwall, what the hell is going on? That man you kidnapped…who is he? Why did your husband need him?”

I decide we’re done.

I push her against her chest, shove her back deeper into the alcove, and I grab her cuffed arms, pull them up, and loop them over a valve fitting for a sprinkler pipe. She squirms and doesn’t say anything from the sudden shift in position and the strain that’s on her arms.

I’m impressed.

I hold the revolver between her eyes, touching her forehead, her thick hair about her shoulders.

“I’ll say this low and slow, so there’s no misunderstanding.” And for emphasis’ sake, I tap the cold steel on her olive skin. “I’m headed out of here. If you follow me, if you try to track me, interfere in any way with what I’m doing, I will shoot you dead.” Another brief tap to her moist forehead. “If I even get the slightest hint that you might be out there, trying to find me, I’ll kill you. And if somewhere along the way, before I get to where I’m going, if I’m arrested or stopped, I will blame it on you. And when I get out of prison, thirty, forty, fifty years down the road…I’ll find you and shoot you dead. Do we have an understanding?”

The CID officer calmly says, “You’re doing this for your family, aren’t you? They’re in some sort of trouble. Your husband, Tom…he was working on a story that got the wrong attention. That’s why you’re doing this.”

I’m not going to give her the benefit of an answer. I tap her forehead again, conscious that I’m in a city library, and at any point, an innocent young library volunteer might stop by and find this disturbing scene.

“Do we have an understanding?”

“Yes,” she says. “But one other thing.”

“Make it quick.”

No hesitation on her part. “I want to help you.”

Rosaria sees the surprise in the woman’s eyes and stays on message.

“This…case, investigation, whatever it is I’m doing, it’s been nuts from the start. I shouldn’t be investigating an AWOL officer, not when you’ve been absent for just a couple of days, and my boss…he’s providing intelligence about you and your movements that someone’s feeding him. I don’t like it. I don’t like it all.”

“Welcome to my world,” Cornwall says.

She squirms, tries to ease the pain in her stretched arms, fails. “I want to help…I…I can’t explain it. But you’re doing something beyond regulations, beyond the law. You’re trying to save your family.”

Cornwall checks her watch. Rosaria says, “Give me your cell phone number, some way of communicating with you, and I’ll tip you off.”

“You intent on committing career suicide?”

Despite having her hands cuffed and being threatened with a revolver, Rosaria almost laughs. “Career suicide? What career do you think I’m going to have when this is over, one way or the other?”