THE LAST WITNESS
What James Knew
There are different ways to know a thing. Some of them are worse than not knowing.
James || Truth || Betrayal || Confrontation
She confronted him on Thursday evening, because she had run the evidence one more time on Thursday morning after a night in a hotel that Lore had arranged, and she had determined that the confrontation was necessary for two reasons: first, because she needed to know before the legal action began, needed to look at him and hear him and make the determination that a conversation rather than a case file could provide; second, because the FBI and Webb had what they needed and the coordination for simultaneous arrests was in its final stages, which meant that James was going to know within seventy-two hours regardless, and she was not going to let him learn it from federal agents if she could learn it from him first. She called him at six p.m. and said she needed to come home and talk. She had been staying with Priya, she said, a law school friend who lived in Wicker Park, because she was uncomfortable at the apartment after the security breach (she did not call it what it was). He was home when she arrived. He looked relieved to see her and then something beneath the relief — which might have been concern and might have been the managed expression of someone who was very good at managing expressions. She sat at the kitchen table. He sat across from her. She put her hands flat on the table and looked at him. “Tell me what you know,” she said. No preamble. No approach. Just the question, direct, with the full weight of her professional intelligence behind it. He looked at her for a long moment. Something moved in his face — not the half-second management this time but something more real, more painful, the specific expression of someone arriving at a moment they have been dreading and finding it exactly as bad as they feared. “How much do you know?” he said. Which was an answer. Which told her that he knew something. “Tell me,” she said. He folded his hands on the table. He was quiet for a moment, the quiet of someone organizing a confession. “My father,” he said. “I’ve known for three years that my father’s business involved things it shouldn’t. Payments to people in city government. Contracts that weren’t competitively bid. The kind of Chicago corruption that everyone knows exists and nobody talks about.” He looked at the table. “Three years ago he told me that a situation had come up that required — he said management. He said a journalist was getting too close to some of the financial arrangements and that it needed to be handled.” “Did he tell you how?” Sara said. “He said Delaney would handle it,” James said. “He didn’t say what handle it meant. I — I told myself it meant managing the information. Pressuring editors. The kind of thing that powerful people do without it being — without it crossing into—” “A man is in a coma, James,” Sara said. Her voice was flat. Not cold — flat, the specific register of a prosecutor managing her own emotional investment in order to continue functioning. “I didn’t know it would come to that,” he said. “I didn’t know what handle it meant. I swear I didn’t know.” “When did you know?” “When I heard about Thomas Greer on the news,” he said. “The attack. I put it together. I called my father. He said it was — he said it was handled and that there was no connection to me and that I needed to stay calm.” He looked up. “And then you came home and told me you’d been in the alley,” he said. “And I — I understood what it meant. I understood that they had used you. That your presence there was—” “Arranged,” she said. He looked at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before and hoped she would never see again: the complete, exposed shame of a person who knows that what they did was wrong and has no adequate account for why they did it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know what you’re sorry for,” she said. “I need to know if you’ve done anything to directly obstruct the investigation. Not your father. You.” “No,” he said. “The payments — the consulting fees — I accepted them because my father asked me to and because I didn’t ask what they were for, which I know is—” “Did you know what they were for?” “Broadly,” he said. “Not specifically. No.” She looked at him for a long time. She had known this man for nine years. She had loved him for eight. She had married him and built a life with him and was carrying his child, and she was sitting across from him in a kitchen that was theirs and trying to determine whether what she was looking at was a criminal or a coward, and whether the distinction mattered. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said. “I’m going to give you the opportunity to cooperate with the federal investigation. Fully. Completely. Everything you know about your father’s network, the payments, the people involved. In exchange, your cooperation will be noted and taken into account by the US Attorney’s office. That’s not a promise of immunity — I don’t have that authority and I wouldn’t use it if I did — but it’s the difference between being a witness and being a defendant.” He stared at her. “You’ve been building a case,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “Against my father.” “Against everyone who’s involved,” she said. “Including your father. Including anyone else who participated.” He was quiet for a long moment. “What about us?” he said. She looked at him. “Us is separate,” she said. “Us is not part of what happens now. What happens now is the law.” He nodded slowly, with the expression of someone receiving something they knew they deserved and finding it no easier for the deserving. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me what you need.” She took out her phone. She called Webb. She said: “James Cole is ready to cooperate.” She said it in her flat, clear, professional voice, in the kitchen of the apartment where she had lived for four years, across from the man she had married, while the city did its ordinary November thing outside the window and the baby pressed against her from the inside with the insistent reality of something that was coming regardless. This was happening. It was almost done. She had three more things to accomplish before it could be finished, and all three of them she was going to accomplish, because that was who she was, and nothing that had happened in the last eleven days had changed that. If anything, it had made it more true.