Cop Cuffs a Black G- at Dinner Party — By Midnight, His Station Was Surrounded
Chapter 8
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Priya hesitated. "No. But he looked at General Reeves before he walked away. Just for a second, before he ever talked to the maître d'.""How did he look at him?""Like he already knew him."Voss didn't answer right away. He was thinking the way a man thinks when a small detail suddenly refuses to stay small. "Write down everything you remember, Priya. Tonight, while it's fresh. Colonel Ashworth is going to want to hear it directly from you."Back at the precinct, Reeves sat in a borrowed office with Ashworth, a cup of untouched coffee cooling on the desk between them, when the colonel's phone buzzed with a message from Voss. Ashworth read it twice. Then he looked up at Reeves, and for the first time that night, there was something in his expression that hadn't been there before. Not surprise, exactly: recognition."Marcus," he said slowly. "I think you're going to want to hear this."He turned the phone around. Reeves read the name on the screen: Warren Pruitt.And something in his face changed quietly, the way a man's face changes when a stray fact he'd stopped looking for finally walks back into the room."You know him," Ashworth said. It wasn't a question.Reeves was quiet for a moment. He was thinking of a conference table eighteen months earlier: a fundraising dinner much like tonight's, a disagreement over a line item in the foundation's budget that Reeves had pushed back on, and a look across the table afterward that he hadn't been able to name at the time and hadn't thought about since."I've met him," Reeves said finally. "Once. He didn't care for something I said."He didn't say more than that; he didn't need to. It wasn't proof of anything yet—just a thread, thin and uncomfortable, connecting a man in a gray suit to a name Reeves hadn't expected to hear again tonight.Outside in the parking lot, a second wave of headlights swept across the precinct's front windows: more government plates, more people who hadn't planned to be awake at this hour, all converging on a building that twelve hours from now would look nothing like the quiet Third Precinct it had been that morning.Warren Pruitt answered his door at 7:00 a.m., still in his bathrobe, coffee in hand, and didn't understand what he was looking at until the two JAG officers behind Colonel Ashworth stepped forward with a folder."Mr. Pruitt, we'd like to ask you about a conversation you had with restaurant staff at the Regency last night.""I don't know what you're talking about.""The server remembers you clearly. So does the maître d', once we asked him directly instead of letting him decide on his own whether it mattered." Ashworth's voice was level, almost gentle—the voice of a man who had already won and felt no need to prove it. "You have an opportunity right now to tell us what you said. After this folder is opened, that opportunity disappears."