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 11 years with a special operations unit, Naval Special Warfare. I've been out for 4 years. I live in Denton because my sister lives in Denton and I needed somewhere to land. He said it simply without weight, 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 2 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 18 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'd just learned that the last two months had contained significantly more moving pieces than she'd understood.
"Quinn, what is this exactly? Are you 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.
Don't confront him. And when he tests me, hold your ground and don't give him a single inch to work with. He paused. Can you do that? She thought about 11 years as a nurse, three of them in psychiatric emergency where deescalation was the difference between controlled and catastrophic.
She thought about two years embedded overseas where keeping a neutral face while people made decisions around you was sometimes the most important skill you had. Yes, she said. They drilled for an hour after that. She was better than she'd been at the start of the month, and she knew it, and she let herself know it without making it into anything more than information. Well, Dale Ror came back to the gym on a Friday.
He walked in during the open mat session at 6:00 p. m. wearing his usual training clothes, carrying his gear bag, moving with the same loose, proprietary ease he always brought into the building. He signed in at the front desk, said something to Garrett that made Garrett nod without meeting his eyes, and moved toward the mat. Savannah was in the middle of a drilling round with a newer member named Petra, a physical therapist who joined 3 weeks ago and was progressing fast. She felt Dale's presence in the room the way she sometimes felt shifts in a trauma bay. Not because anything had happened yet, but because the atmospheric pressure of a situation had changed.