The field office has a particular smell in the evening — stale coffee and carpet cleaner and the specific industrial warmth of a building that has been running fluorescent lights for twelve hours. Donahue has stopped noticing it. Briggs has never noticed it at all.
It is eight-fifteen. Most of the floor is empty. Donahue is at his desk reading case files. Briggs is at his, which is the one nearest the window, doing something on his computer that is probably catching up on paperwork and is definitely not catching up on paperwork.
"Profile's solid," Briggs says, without looking up.
"Thank you."
"The medical training piece is airtight. I showed it to Kimball in pathology and she said—"
"I know what Kimball said. I talked to her."
"Right." A pause. Briggs turns slightly in his chair. He is broad-shouldered, gray at the temples, with the careful neutral face of a man who has spent years watching his own expressions in interview rooms. "I've been thinking about the targets."
"What about them?"
"They're all guilty." Briggs says it the way you say a fact — matter-of-factly, without inflection.
Donahue does not look up from his file. "That's not established."
"It's established. I've read the records. Every one of them has a violent criminal history. Every one of them beat something or beat someone or both."
"That's their history. Not our mandate."
"I know." A longer pause. Briggs is quiet in the way of someone who is not done. "I'm just saying. If you're building a profile — if you're trying to understand the motivation — you have to reckon with the fact that the motivation is not irrational. By any framework where the justice system's failure has moral weight, what this person is doing has—"
"Briggs."
"What?"
"Don't finish that sentence." Donahue still does not look up. His voice is flat and precise. "Our job is not to evaluate whether the targets deserved it. Our job is to find the person who decided they had the authority to make that call and arrest them."
A silence. Briggs turns back to his computer.
"Right," he says, after a moment. "Of course."
But the question stays in the room. It sits between the two desks like something neither of them will pick up.
Donahue reads three more pages before he realizes he has not retained a word of them.
He puts the file down.
He thinks about the question Briggs did not finish.
Then he picks the file up again.