Black-Belt Cop Choked a Nurse in Sparring — Then Her Navy SEAL Past Made Him Regret It
Chapter 7
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She stopped walking. "How did you get my number?" she asked."A complaint was filed this week regarding conduct during a training session at Irongate Combat Academy. You were present. We're reaching out to witnesses." Another pause. "Ms. Cole, you're not the only one who's reported something, but we'd appreciate your account specifically."She stood in the concrete stairwell with the fluorescent light buzzing overhead, her bag strap digging into her shoulder, and felt the particular vertiginous sensation of something shifting that had been still for a long time."I'm available," she said. "Tell me where."She wrote down the address, hung up, and stood there for a moment longer.Someone had filed a complaint. Not her, but someone.She thought about Quinn sitting on that bench. She thought about the way he'd said, He felt all three, with the flat certainty of someone who'd cataloged the same thing she had and decided it meant something. She thought about what it meant that a man who never spoke to anyone, who trained alone on Saturday mornings, who hadn't volunteered a single unnecessary detail about himself in two months of working together—what it meant that that man had apparently decided that what happened on that mat needed to go somewhere.She walked to her car, drove home through the dark, and for the first time in weeks, fell asleep before midnight.She had no way of knowing that Quinn Ferrell's name appeared nowhere on the complaint. And she had no way of knowing that the person who'd filed it had done so not as a gym member, but using a set of credentials that had no business being attached to a civilian grappling academy in a midsize Colorado city—credentials that would, two days from now, cause Lieutenant Sandoval to pick up his phone and make a call he wasn't expecting to make. The call that would change everything about what anyone thought they knew about the quiet man in the gray shirt.Lieutenant Ira Sandoval's office was on the third floor of Denton PD's administrative building: a room that smelled like printer toner and old coffee, with a window that looked out onto the parking structure and nothing beyond it. He was a compact man in his early 50s, neat in the way that suggested discipline rather than vanity, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a legal pad in front of him that already had notes on it when Savannah sat down.She'd come in on her day off, worn civilian clothes—jeans, a gray sweater, the same work boots she wore to the gym. She hadn't dressed up, hadn't dressed down; she'd just come in.Sandoval thanked her for her time and asked if she wanted water. She said no. He uncapped his pen and looked at her over the legal pad."I want to be clear about something before we begin," he said. "You are here as a witness, not a subject. Nothing you say today creates any obligation or liability for you. We're fact-finding.""I understand," she said."How long have you been a member at Irongate?""About eight weeks."