"I haven't claimed either one does."
"Then stop acting like you're untouchable."
Angela folded her hands and went silent. She would later remember the expression on Phillips's face, a fleeting embarrassment he tried to conceal by looking down at his notes. Martinez continued talking for several minutes, but without her participation the interview could not become the confession he seemed to expect. Finally he closed the folder and ordered her returned to holding.
In a cell across the corridor sat a young woman wearing a thin gray sweatshirt. She was shivering despite the warm night outside, and her face bore a darkening bruise near one cheekbone. Angela waited until the guard had moved away before asking quietly whether she needed help.
"They said I was loitering," the woman whispered. "I was sitting outside my apartment waiting for my sister."
"Where do you live?"
"Eastgate. The old apartments on Mercer."
Angela knew the address. Vision Heights had announced plans to redevelop that area months earlier, describing the project as an improvement for a community with supposedly high crime. "Has somebody been trying to buy your building?" she asked.
The woman's eyes widened. "How did you know?"
Before Angela could reply, a guard ordered them to be quiet. But the connection remained. The campaign was not confined to one street. Whatever Holt was helping Vision Heights accomplish had reached across neighborhoods, and ordinary residents were being processed through these cells as the cost of a private business plan.
Three states away, Marcus Brooks stood in the corridor of a military operations building with a phone in one hand and his travel bag at his feet. He had been reviewing training reports when Angela called. He was usually difficult to surprise, but the words "ten cruisers" had made his stomach tighten before she even mentioned Holt. By the time the connection died, he had heard enough to know he needed to return home immediately.
The first person he called was Commander Sarah Maxwell, a military legal officer he knew from a previous assignment. She listened without interrupting while he described the claimed search authority and the risk to his wife. Then she asked a question he appreciated for its precision: whether he had any indication that the police had entered the locked cabinet containing government-issued communications material.
"I don't know yet," Marcus admitted. "Angela was outside and being restrained. I need to know what was touched."
"We'll assess that separately," Maxwell said. "But this isn't automatically federal land because you live there. Your strongest immediate issues are her safety, the grounds for the search, the use of force, and the accuracy of the police report. Get her a civilian attorney. Preserve everything."
Marcus already had one name in mind: Diana Washington, a civil rights lawyer who had represented two veterans in an employment-retaliation case several years earlier. Diana answered late, her voice hoarse with sleep but instantly alert when he mentioned Angela. She asked for the station address, the captain's name, and whether any medical care had been offered. Then she told Marcus she would send an associate to make inquiries before arriving herself.