He stepped in without knocking. “You planning to fire me over a traffic stop?”
Voss stood. “Cole.”
Amara remained seated. “I have made no employment decision.”
Ransom laughed bitterly. “Right.”
“But I will tell you something now,” she continued. “If you falsify your report, destroy footage, pressure Deputy Price, alter an evidence log, or retaliate against anyone who witnessed tonight, that will become a separate problem from the windows.”
Ransom’s face flushed.
“You threatening me?”
Amara looked toward the camera in the corner.
“I am making the record simple.”
At 11:17 the front doors opened and Sheriff Thomas Halbrook entered wearing jeans, a raincoat, and the expression of a man who had been called out of his final evening in office for a reason nobody had managed to explain over the phone.
He saw Ransom first.
Then Price.
Then the wet paperwork on the evidence counter.
Finally he looked through the interview-room window and saw Amara Bennett sitting at the table.
Halbrook stopped walking.
“What,” he said, “did you people do?”
Nobody answered.
He entered the room and looked at Amara’s wrists.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Why are you in here?”
“Apparently the department is reviewing whether refusing a warrantless search is obstruction.”
Halbrook closed his eyes for one second.
Ransom appeared in the doorway. “Sheriff, I can explain.”
Halbrook turned on him. “You better not start with an explanation. Start with the legal basis.”
Ransom opened his mouth.
Price spoke first.
“There wasn’t one after the registration came back.”
The station went silent again.
Halbrook looked at the clock: 11:21.
Then he looked at Amara.
“Your swearing-in is in thirty-nine minutes.”
Ransom’s expression finally changed in a way it had not on the highway. Not anger. Not denial.
Fear.
Halbrook saw it and said, “Yeah, Cole. Midnight means midnight.”
Amara stood.
“I still intend to take the oath on time.”
Halbrook nodded slowly.
Ransom stared at her as though the woman from the roadside had transformed in front of him, though nothing about Amara had changed except what he now understood.
She picked up her damp transition papers.
“Sheriff Halbrook,” she said, “before we do anything else, lock the evidence room access logs and place an administrative preservation hold on every recording from tonight.”
Halbrook looked toward Voss.
“Do it.”
Ransom started to speak.
Amara stopped him with one sentence.