Lawson's breathing was ragged, shallow gasps pluming into white mist in the freezing air. His hand was trembling so violently over his holster that the leather creaked. He looked from his sister's tarnished silver mockingbird necklace to the face of his mentor.
"Mitch," Lawson's voice cracked. "Tell me it's a lie. Tell me you didn't touch Sarah."
Hayes didn't look at his partner. His deep-set eyes were frantically scanning the dark treeline, calculating the odds of a sprint, the odds of a firefight, the odds of survival. "Shut up, Toby. She's a fed. She's playing with your head."
"She didn't know about the necklace, Mitch!" Lawson screamed, the raw, agonizing grief of 15 years finally tearing through his throat. "Nobody knew about the necklace! The department kept it out of the papers! Only the killer knew!"
Lawson unholstered his Glock 19. The sharp, mechanical clack of a round being chambered echoed like a cannon shot in the quiet night. He leveled the barrel directly at Hayes's chest. "Hands away from your belt! Do it now!"
Hayes slowly raised his hands, his fingers twitching. He looked back at Maya, a venomous, cornered desperation replacing the shock.
"Who are you?" Hayes snarled, spitting the words. "The AG's office doesn't send lone wolves into the woods to play traffic stop. Who the hell are you, really?"
Maya carefully closed her wallet and slipped it back into her pocket. The freezing wind whipped a stray lock of hair across her face, but she didn't bother to brush it away. She wanted him to see her eyes. She wanted him to see the absolute certainty of his destruction.
"You don't recognize me," Maya said softly, the words dripping with decades of suppressed venom. "You take so much from so many people, you don't even remember the faces of the families you slaughter."
Hayes squinted against the glare of the flashlight on the ground.
"Fourteen years ago," Maya began, her voice dropping into a register of pure, icy gravel, "you pulled over a rusty Ford pickup on this exact stretch of highway. You claimed the driver was swerving. You claimed you smelled marijuana. You ripped his truck apart, just like you did my bag tonight. And when you didn't find anything, you planted two kilos of cocaine under his spare tire because Tommy Gallagher paid you $10,000 to make sure that driver never made it to his testimony against the syndicate."
Hayes's eyes widened slightly; a distant, buried memory was struggling to claw its way to the surface of his mind.