“You seem certain,” he said.
“I’ve been a trauma nurse for six years,” she said.
“I know what it looks like when someone crosses a line and everyone decides they didn’t see it.”
“I’m not doing that.”
He nodded slowly, clicked his pen closed.
“We appreciate that, Miss Cole.”
She left the building at eleven-fifteen in the morning, walked to her car in the parking structure, and sat in the driver’s seat for a moment with her hands in her lap.
The interview had gone fine.
She’d said what she needed to say.
She’d been clear and specific, and she hadn’t apologized once, which was a thing she’d had to actively work against three separate times.
What she was sitting with now was the other thing, the credentials, the federal liaison portal.
She’d done enough time adjacent to federal systems to understand what that meant.
It meant Quinn Ferrell wasn’t just a quiet man who showed up to open mat on Saturdays.
It meant whatever chapter of his life he’d put behind him wasn’t as far behind him as he’d implied, or maybe as he’d intended.
She drove home.
She called no one.
She made a decision not to ask him about it directly, which was a decision she was fairly sure she’d reverse within forty-eight hours.
It took thirty-six.
I was already on the mat when she got there Wednesday evening, which wasn’t his usual night.
She stopped just inside the door when she saw him, recalibrated, and walked over anyway because she wasn’t going to manage around him.
“You weren’t here last Wednesday,” she said, setting her bag down.
“I know,” he said.
“Are you here because of the IIA thing?”
Quinn looked at her steadily.
“Are you asking me if I filed the complaint?”
“I’m asking why you’re here on a Wednesday.”
A long pause.
“Garrett called me, said there had been some official inquiries and he wanted people who knew what happened to be around in case anyone came by.”
She absorbed that.
“He called you specifically.”
“He knows a little more about my background than I’ve shared in general.”
She looked at him.
“How much more?”
Quinn stood up from where he’d been sitting and picked up his water bottle.
He looked like someone who was deciding something.
And she’d been around enough people making genuine decisions to recognize the difference between that and performance.
“I spent eleven years with a special operations unit, Naval Special Warfare.”
“I’ve been out for four years.”
“I live in Denton because my sister lives in Denton and I needed somewhere to land.”
He said it simply, without wait like he was reciting facts from a file he’d read so many times they’d stopped being personal.
“Garrett knew me before from a different context.”
“He asked me to come in and keep an eye on things when the membership complaint started coming in about Ror.”
“That was two months ago.”
Savannah was quiet for a moment.
Outside, a car moved through the parking lot.
“So you were here because of Dale?”
She said initially.
She wasn’t sure what to do with the word initially, so she set it aside.
“You filed the complaint through a federal portal.”
“I still have access to certain systems through a consulting arrangement,” he said.
“It’s legitimate.”
“The complaint is legitimate.”
“I didn’t fabricate anything.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said.
“I was there.”
He looked at her.
“You’re not angry.”
“I’m trying to figure out how I feel about being watched without knowing it.”
“That’s fair,” he said, “It is.”
She agreed.
“Did you find anything else beyond what happened to me?”
Quinn set his bottle down on the bench and sat back down.
“Three other women in the last eighteen months.”
“Two left the gym without saying why.”
“One filed a complaint internally with Garrett that got buried.”
“One of them I tracked down and she’s willing to talk to IIA.”
He paused.
“Ror has also had two use of force incidents flagged within the department that were reviewed and closed.”
“The closures were fast, faster than normal.”
“The information landed with the particular weight of things you suspected but hadn’t yet had confirmed.”
She sat down on the bench across from him.
“Who closed them?”
She asked.
“A senior officer in Ror’s precinct, guy named Captain Hensley.”
“They’ve known each other for a long time.”
“It’s not provable yet, but Sandival is already looking at it.”
“You’ve been talking to Sandival?”
“Yes.”
She rubbed her face with both hands, a gesture she didn’t usually let herself make in front of people because it felt too exposed.
But she was tired and it was a Wednesday night and she just learned that the last two months had contained significantly more moving pieces than she’d understood.
“Quinn, what is this exactly? Are you working? Is this an assignment?”
“No,” he said.
“I’m a member of a gym where someone was getting hurt and nobody was stopping it.”
A beat.
“That’s all this is.”
She looked at him for a long time.
She was good at reading people.
Not infallible, but good.
She’d spent years learning the difference between what people said and what they meant in circumstances where getting it wrong had real consequences.
She believed him.
She wasn’t sure that made it less complicated, but she believed him.
“Okay,” she said finally.
“Okay, okay, we keep going.”
“What do you need from me?”
Something shifted in his expression.
Not relief exactly, more like the adjustment a room makes when a window opens.
“Your written statement to IIA, the name of your coworker who you’ve discussed this with, and you need to know that Ror is going to find out about the complaint within the next week, probably sooner, and his response to that is going to matter.”
“You think he’ll come at me directly?”
“I think he’ll test the situation first.”
“He’ll come to the gym.”
“He’ll be calm, controlled, and he’ll try to gauge how much you’ve said and to whom.”
“He won’t threaten you openly because he’s smart enough not to.”
Quinn looked at her evenly.
“You should keep training. Show up exactly like you normally would.”
“Don’t tell him anything.”