"I know," Marcus said. "That's what the word means."
He paid for his coffee. She let him.
*
The meeting was in a second-floor conference room with a laminate table, a pitcher of water, and a framed aerial photograph of Merritt from the 1960s, when it was bigger. Chief Tolland, a heavy, courteous man, began reading a prepared statement and then, to his credit, put it down. Yost sat with a legal pad she never wrote on. Rosalind sat at Marcus's elbow, the union representative at the end.
Dale Rusk sat across the table in a plain gray sport coat, without sunglasses.
That was the first thing. For eleven weeks Marcus had seen that face in his mind with two small rooms of red and blue light where the eyes should be. Now there were eyes, pale blue, a little bloodshot, in a face that looked older than forty-four. They were ordinary. Marcus had not been prepared for that. They were the eyes of a man he might have filled a prescription for. Blood pressure. Something for sleep.
When the chief said, "Officer Rusk asked to speak," Rusk unfolded a sheet of paper, looked at it, and folded it back into his jacket.
"I wrote something. It sounds like a report. I'm not going to read it." He looked up. "I was wrong about the car."
"You were wrong about me," Marcus said.
A pause. "Yes. I was wrong about you."
"Then I have a question. I asked it that night and you didn't answer it, and I don't think you answered it for the lieutenant either. The radio came back. You knew. I watched you know. Why was I still wearing the cuffs?"
Rusk didn't look at his rep. He looked at the wood grain printed on the laminate.
"There was a girl with a phone at the door," he said. "And I thought, if I say sorry, it's on there. It's a confession. So I stood there looking for the version where I'd been right. Going through it. There wasn't one. I kept looking anyway." He swallowed. "That's what the time was. That's what you stood there for. While I looked."
"A minute fifty."
"I know the number."