Chapter 14: For the File

The video was fourteen minutes long.

We watched it on the porch step with the screen tilted toward the dark, and Sullivan did not look away once.

It was shot from a doorway.

A man lay on a hardwood floor with his arms locked over his head, and he was saying a name, over and over, that wasn't hers.

It was one of the two men he had lost.

"Easy," a woman said behind the camera. Her voice was warm and level. "Easy, Sullivan. That's good. Keep going."

She wasn't talking to him the way you talk to someone you want to stop.

"Minute six," she said, to nobody. "He's still not responsive."

Sullivan's hand tightened on his knee.

On screen he rolled onto his side, and I saw his face for the first time, wet and blank, and I had to look at the porch boards for a second.

"Daddy will want to see this," Whitney said, very softly. "For the file."

I looked up.

She said it again at minute ten, when he had finally stopped, and sat against the wall shaking.

She didn't cross the room.

She held the phone steady, and she waited for the end of it, and then she said, "There. Now I know what I'm dealing with."

The screen went dark.

I sat there with the phone dead in my hand.

"She never touched you," I said.

"She stood in the door," Sullivan said. "I remember a door."

"Fourteen minutes."

"I know."

"She had you on a list."

"Carina."

"You were on the floor and she wrote you in a file."

I saved the video to my phone, and then I emailed it to myself, and then I sat looking at the sent mail.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Keeping the whole thing. Her voice is on it."

"It's not your fight."

"It's the only thing she's got, and it's not even what she thinks it is."

I stood up.

I took his good hand and pulled him to his feet.

"Where are we going?"

"Upstairs," I said. "My room."

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