Page 102 of Forever Dark
“My client was a passenger on a bus.If his driver didn’t respond as he should have, then it should be he you’re questioning.”
He’s happy to let one of his followers take the fall,Selena thought.
Selena turned the next page and pressed on Brenda, then Lauren, then Tara again, but the force had gone out of the room.Every question now carried the knowledge that she had overcommitted, that Croft had seen it, that Vail had seen it, and that both were content to let her keep digging while the soil fell back into the hole behind her.
At last, she circled once more to the third murder.
“Tara Brennan was taken while you were camped less than twenty miles away,” she said.“Your revival was the last confirmed common thread between all three victims.”
Croft’s expression remained almost compassionate.
Selena moved uncomfortably in her chair.
“And I have an alibi,” Croft finally answered.
Vail closed his folder with a crisp snap.“Your office should have considered that before staging a roadside spectacle and hauling in a preacher with no evidence beyond proximity and prejudice.”
Selena felt the blow of that last word and despised him for using it because it was clever enough to be effective.
“There’s more here than proximity,” she said.
“Then by all means,” Vail replied, “present it.”
No one spoke for a moment.
The lights above cast sterile hues.
Far away in the building a phone rang and stopped.
Croft looked down at his folded hands as if the whole thing bored him now.
Selena closed the file.
Not because she was done.Because there was no value in showing how much ground had just given way beneath her.
She stood.
Vail had already opened his briefcase and was pulling out another pad.“I’ll be drafting a formal complaint regarding the stop, the detention, and the arrest.I’d advise your office to preserve every radio transmission and dash-cam recording associated with this afternoon.”
Connor had once told her there was no man more confident than a lawyer who smelled county-level panic.
He had been right about that, too.
Selena gathered her photographs into a neat stack.“We’re not finished.”
Croft looked up at her, still seated, still calm.
“Agent Raven,” he said, “I suspect you may be.”
She left before she said something she would regret.
The corridor outside felt too bright.Voices carried from the front desk.Boots squeaked somewhere on linoleum.Selena walked past it all without seeing much and pushed through the exterior door into the parking lot.
Cold air hit her face.
Only then did she stop.
The sheriff’s department lot was half full.Deputy SUVs.Civilian trucks.A rusted sedan that had probably been abandoned there after a custody dispute or a DUI arrest.Late afternoon light had thinned toward evening, washing everything in the tired color of old steel.
