Before her is Paul Santiago, a detective from the Victoria Police Department’s Assault Crimes Unit, and he’s scratching at the side of his bald head with a pen as he tries to make sense of what he has just encountered here with Rosaria and Captain Cornwall. A small notebook is open on the table in front of him.

“I’m sorry if I sound confused,” he says, “but tell me again why you were here in Victoria.”

She rubs at her wrists but keeps them below the table, out of view of the detective so he can’t see. “Like I said before, I was tracking Captain Amy Cornwall. I had received information that she was in this facility.”

“Information from whom?”

“My boss at our base in Quantico, Virginia.”

“And you didn’t think to contact us first?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” she says. “The case was moving quickly. I didn’t have time to contact you, or to contact anyone else.”

“And what kind of case is this?”

A nightmare case that could kill me or kill my career, she thinks. “Captain Cornwall is AWOL. Absent without leave.”

“So that’s why you came in the library by yourself. Because you were concerned that she might leave the premises and that you would lose her trail.”

“Correct.”

He scratches at the side of his head again. He has a thick brown mustache and brown eyes that are sharp and to the point.

“All by yourself.”

Rosaria says, “Repeating yourself doesn’t change the facts.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he says. “Tell me this, Miss—”

“Special Agent Vasquez, please.”

He doesn’t smile or react, just says, “Tell me this, Special Agent Vasquez, it seems that your Captain Amy Cornwall is considered a suspect in a double homicide yesterday afternoon in Three Rivers. Is that true?”

Rosaria stops rubbing her wrists. “I’m not aware of that information.”

“Really?”

Scritch-scritch comes the sound of the pen rubbing against his head. “Three Rivers is about ninety miles from here. Not much of a drive. And we received a BOLO this morning about Captain Cornwall. Before I spoke to you, I talked to Miss Chambers who works at the library. I showed her a photo of Captain Cornwall. Miss Chambers readily identified her.”

“That’s…interesting.”

“Yep.”

He lowers his pen and says, “I also chatted up a police captain over there in Three Rivers. You can imagine they’re quite busy, investigating a double homicide. It seems your Captain Cornwall drove all the way from Virginia, to a tiny town that hardly anybody has heard of, to assault that house, kill two well-armed men, and then leave, with another person in tow. Pretty unusual, don’t you think?”

Rosaria says, “I can’t think of anything more unusual that I’ve heard of lately.”

Santiago picks up his pen, starts scratching the other side of his head, just above his left ear, where there’s a line of faint brown stubble, looking like a farmer’s field of corn after harvesttime. Rosaria is trying to war-game what’s going to happen here, what she’s going to tell her boss, and most of all, how to extricate herself from Victoria without being subject to more interviews, more interrogations.