The phone thrums against the glass of the booth like a moth. I watch the caller ID resolve into numbers I recognize and a name I don’t. I don’t need the name. The cadence in my ear is theatre: a breath measured, a vowel placed dead center.
“You want her alive?” Lyle asks. “You earn it at the angels.”
“Give me coordinates,” I say, voice low, throat raw from a morning of logistics and dust. “Cross streets. Boat slip. Lock code. I don’t air an ultimatum; I verify a location.”
“Verification is the narcotic of cowards,” he says. “Catharsis is earned. You stole an audience, Mara. Come return it.”
I stare past my reflection to the dark auditorium where Elena’s plainclothes network occupies chalk-dotted seats. “No audience. Just documentation and safety. We do this in a room with officers and a recorder.”
“You still believe you can control a stage.” The smile clicks against the mic. “The cherubs miss you.”
“You’re dodging,” I say. “Prove she’s breathing. One detail only she would know. She liked—” I stop before I say a food, a song, something he could have scraped. “Give me yesterday’s timestamp on her phone.”
“Wrong genre,” he says. “The finale fixes the past by staging it.”
I flick a fingertip against the glass. Elena catches the motion and raises two fingers: go to plan. I switch to the secure channel. “Bring him,” I say. “No civilians. Delay line closed.”
We leave the glassbox for the damp street. The tidal creek has crawled up to the corner again, turning the sidewalk into a sheet of jittering chrome. The air holds that factory-sugar note, warm and burnt, over the cold metal smell of the Orpheum’s chain. I taste it on my tongue the way I taste bad coffee: a decision.
Elena’s voice is linen-crisp. “We hold your rules,” she says. “No live. Two rooms rolling. Counsel on standby.”
“And the chair?” I ask.
“Bolted,” she says, and we both look away because the sight of it says too much.
We seat him with no flourish. He comes in almost soft-footed, coat sleeves neat, ring glint curtailed by our house at half. “Welcome to the angels,” he says to the cherubs instead of to me. “House kept at confession’s temperature. Cool enough for a shiver.”
“Sit,” Elena says, businesslike, and a plainclothes in a navy hoodie steps just far enough to be seen. We’ve kept the dead-end cues dark. We’ve taped a tamper strip no one will touch. We’ve replaced spectacle with geometry.
I stay three paces from the bolted chair and hold a handheld recorder at my shoulder, red eye on. The theatre smells like rosin, rust, and last night’s rain. The wood under my boots creaks with unglamorous honesty. He studies the stage like an appraiser.
“Say her name,” I tell him.
“Names are currency,” he says. “Spend them and you’re broke.”
“Say the location. GPS coordinates. A landmark. A lock brand. Speak in nouns or don’t speak.”
He tilts his head, watching how the work light scallops the proscenium’s plaster babies. “The world begs for verbs,” he says. “Confess, rescue, punish, cancel, cleanse. We’ve spent a decade cleaving sentences into commands and calling it justice.”
“You called me,” I say. “You promised me a location. Deliver a coordinate or you’re not even a sentence.”
He smiles without showing teeth. “You want latitude and longitude to pretend a map is a moral. You want a keycode to pretend opening a door is a sacrament. I want—” He pauses, savoring the shape of his want. “I want the audience you raised on cliffhangers to learn what a cliff is for.”
“You want an audience,” I say. “You can have a bench.”
Elena’s nod is a metronome at the edge of my eye: keep him talking, keep him fenced. She seats two more plainclothes with soft movements, teachers and nurses with still backs. Jonah’s delay buffer sits fat and ready in the van; I imagine its seconds stacked like sandbags.
I try again. “Where is Alina?” I ask. “Where did you touch, and with what? Speak in verifiable. Date. Time. Route. The color of the door.”
“You still think truth is what fits into a police report,” he says. “But truth is staging. You drag a light where no one looked, and suddenly a chair is a throne or a trap. You should understand. You built a church on dead air and the beating of a clock.”
“I built a room where families could be heard,” I say. “And then I used it wrong. I know my sins better than you do.” I let the recorder’s red eye blink in the corner of his vision. “Say one thing we can confirm, and I’ll use the room right.”
He leans into the chair back and closes his eyes like he’s hearing an orchestra tune. “You never asked why the cherubs have cracked smiles,” he says. “You never asked why an audience must watch suffering to feel absolved. You only asked who and where and whether you’d be first.”
“You’re not answering,” I say.
“I’m refusing the wrong exam,” he answers, and the chair squeals because he pushes one foot out like a dancer testing distance.
Elena speaks for the first time since the seating. “Mr. Corcoran, do you understand you’re being recorded?” Her voice could cut glass.
“I would be insulted if I weren’t,” he says, eyes bright at the edge.
“Do you wish to name counsel?” she asks.
“Counsel is a third act,” he says. “We’re in the monologue.”
Micro-hook: His monologue is a weapon shaped like air. If I try to cut it, I give it edge. If I let it pool, I drown in it. I choose to make it puddle and show the shallow.
“Tell me the last word she spoke to you,” I say. “One syllable. I’ll check it against a text thread I have legal access to.”
He sighs like a patient tutor. “Catharsis is earned,” he repeats, tasting the repetition. “The Greeks understood this. We carry a weight to the altar. We set it down together. Tears as tithe. Silence as absolution.”
“You’re describing expensive theatre,” I say. “Not rescue.” I tilt the recorder closer so my arm shakes and steadies again. “Nobody gets absolution here. Not me. Not you. Give a location or admit you came for applause.”
His eyes flick to my hand, to the tremor I didn’t hide. “There she is,” he says. “The acolyte of sound.”
“Where.” I don’t leave the question a question. I lay it like brick.
He inhales the theatre: dust, varnish, an old understage damp that never quite leaves. “Under bridges, truth echoes,” he says. “On water, myth floats.”
Elena’s pen scratches. An officer’s camera blinks red like a heartbeat under a hoodie. I imagine the tidal creek pushing toward the river, carrying away cigarette butts and confetti from a Night Choir pin swap, carrying toward the bridge where we found his boat. The city hums outside like my aquarium studio, filters working to keep us alive.
“You rehearsed this,” I say. “The no-facts sermon. The myth maintenance. You never intended a confession. You intended an ending.”
He tips an invisible hat. “Climax gives meaning to suffering.”
“Not to victims,” I say. “To directors.” I taste copper at the word. I have to lean back or I’ll throw the recorder.
Elena lifts her chin. “We’re done with poetry,” she says. “Where is Alina Corbett?”
“Safe until the house learns to sit in earned silence,” he says. “Give the angels their due.”
The word safe burns. My mouth goes dry. I hear the buffer in my head tick tick tick and wonder what it would do to me if I dumped his voice into a million earbuds right now. The Night Choir would devour, digest, demand more. He would become a saint of refusal. I have a kill switch and a pledge taped to the glass across town.
I lower the recorder by one inch. “We’re off-air,” I tell him. “We will remain off-air.”
He flinches—small, mean surprise. “You don’t get to choose the volume,” he says, and I hear the boy who lost a sister in a hit-and-run, taught by indifferent gatekeepers that attention is oxygen.
“I do today,” I say.
He leans forward, elbows on knees, lover-close to the mic that isn’t broadcasting. “Then you kill your own god,” he whispers. “And none of this saves anyone.”
“I’m okay with killing a god,” I say. “I’m less okay with feeding a ghost.” I glance at Elena. “Get his ring. Photograph the interior. We still have the mold.”
“Hands,” Elena says, and the hoodie cop moves like a stagehand, efficient, almost invisible.
Lyle sits very still while they bag the ring. He keeps looking up at the cherubs like they alone understand performance. I put my recorder on the floor between us and speak to the air the way I used to when a caller fled silence. “Fact check: you have no location you intend to share,” I say. “You have doctrine. You have a manifesto you’d prefer me to serialize.”
“You have blood on your edit bay,” he says, voice lower. “You left dead women in your outro music and called it empathy. I’m your mirror.”
The line hits its mark, because I have worn that bruise since episode one, and he knows it. My whole body answers by stilling. I count four beats before I trust my jaw.
“You’re my industry’s consequence,” I say. “Not my mirror. I’ll hold my harm without outsourcing your cruelty to my reflection.” I nod to Elena. “Timestamp his phrasing. Flag ‘earned catharsis’ across the evidence.”
She lifts her pen. “Marked.”
Micro-hook: This is the moment he thought he’d win—the moment he hears his words minted into cultural currency by my mic. Taking that away is how I cut him. Taking that away might save someone.
He tries once more. “Let them hear it,” he says. “Give the crowd the altar. They’ll carry what I’ve said to the river. They’ll feel the right ache. That ache moves policy.”
“The ache made you,” I say. “I’m not handing you more mortals to hollow out.”
I straighten, and the movement feels like a decision I’ve kept refusing. “We’re done,” I tell him. “You came to perform a confession that isn’t. You can soliloquize to the arrest report.”
He tips his head, conceding nothing. “There’s your headline.”
“There’s no headline,” I say, and I nod to Jonah’s camera tucked under a hoodie two rows back. He lifts a thumb: recording continues, broadcast stays dark. We control the light.
Lyle breathes out stage air like incense. “You’ll leak anyway,” he murmurs. “Someone will.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But not me.” I step back and the bolted chair creaks, deprived of his weight leaning into my space. “You don’t get my megaphone.”
Elena signals. Two officers move in, not cuffs yet—just presence. Lyle’s hands rest on his knees, palms up like he’s offering proof he never intended to give.
I walk to the dimmer rack. The sliders are cold metal under my fingertips, a relief after the heat of the stage. The house sits at half, the way I like it, faces softened, edges truer. I don’t lift them. I don’t drop them either. I let the room hold a hush that hurts in a better way than a crescendo.
Outside, a long truck sighs over standing water, a sound like a huge animal laying down. The sweet factory smell drifts in again, sticky against the back of my throat. Somewhere, the creek taps a regular beat into the storm grate like a metronome counting us toward an end that isn’t his.
“We still need Alina,” Elena says quietly at my shoulder.
“We will get her without giving him a stage,” I say, and my voice surprises me with how level it lands. “We cut spectacle. We keep recording.”
Lyle laughs softly, no joy, only technique. “You’ll find that silence is a kind of microphone,” he says.
“I know,” I tell him, and I lift my palm to the dimmer like I’m feeling the heat off a candle I won’t blow out.
The hush takes shape around the bolted chair. It’s not applause. It’s not a headline. It’s a choice heavy enough to bruise my hand where it meets the fader.
I keep it there, steady, and ask the dark my next move in a whisper that sounds like a promise to whoever needs it more than he does:
When I turn the lights down further, what truth will become visible that his myth can’t swallow?