Tobias gave a mirthless laugh, pressing the heel of his uninjured hand to his forehead.
“Yeah, I fuckin' know'er.” Tobais raised haunted eyes to the ceiling, and Nasa was certain whatever Tobias was about to say would change everything. “I interrogated her back when I worked with the HIG.”
Raid and Damon looked to him for an explanation, but even as he answered their silent question, Nasa couldn't take his eyes off Tobias.
“The FBI, Department of Defense, and CIA came together after 9/11 and formed the High-Value Interrogation Group. Inter-agency cooperation to interrogate terrorists wherever they may be.”
“Seriously, bro?” Duke guffawed, looking at his partner as though he were seeing Tobias, the real Tobias, for the first time.
Nasa felt like he'd just been shoved into an ice bath, his breath stolen from him in a painful rush. All those scenarios he’d imagined to explain Dillon’s scars… being interrogated by his own government hadn’t been one of them.
“My team and I were stationed overseas. I was FBI, had a few DOD guys with me, and we were working in Iraq to get intelligence out of the insurgents captured during whatever battle they engaged in that day.
"Wasn't there for more than three months before we got caught in an ambush. My team died; I didn't, so I got sent home.”
Tobias dully stared into the bottom of the bottle as though his past played out on the surface of the booze like a bad movie.
“I got placed with a three-man crew after a week of being stateside, and we were tasked with questioning a woman suspected of using her position as a translator for the local PD to coordinate and move women and kids across state lines for some trafficker I'd never heard of.
“That was all they told me. That Dillon worked with vulnerable victims when she came in to translate for the local PD.
"That she had contacts to organized crime because of those victims, and it was our job to extract information out of her and get all the details we could about the trafficking operation.
“I didn't like anything about the assignment. Nothing made sense, but I got dicked around by the two senior agents for being the new guy who didn't understand the way things worked in their neck of the woods.
“I was tired, still fucked up from my time overseas, still trying to reconcile everything that happened to me wallowing in my own fuckin’ guilt, so I hung back and let them do their thing.
“The supervisory agent in charge told us we had all the evidence we needed to prove she was peddling flesh, and it was good enough to get shit rolling.” Tobias rasped, hissing as the memories got closer.
“The two senior agents—Simpson and Styles—they'd been partners for over a decade and bragged about how they'd been trained by CIA in the eighties, back when the government really got shit done.
“They had a routine they'd built together over the years and practically moved in tandem. They started out easy, verbal interrogation, mind games, the whole—no one is coming for you, you're alone, confess or you'll never leave here alive—all the shit they say to break a person.”
Tobias's voice cracked a little, his hand shaking as he pulled his palm down over his face.
“I believed she was innocent after five hours, but Simpson and Styles weren't convinced, said they had experience and could smell the guilt on her or some bullshit.
“I called my direct supervisor and told him what I thought. He said the intel we had was solid, and we had to be sure because the lives of women and children were at stake, blah blah blah.
"When I came back, I found Simpson and Styles in the wet room. Simpson's specialty was water-boarding. Said he had it down to a science, and he wasn't wrong.
“On someone not trained to withstand that kind of thing, it's a hundred percent effective, and her story never changed.
"She confessed to having stolen the cinnamon gum out of her fifth grade teacher's desk at the age of eight, and replaced it with the shit that's supposed to turn your mouth black.
“She told us about the time she slashed some dude's tires at school, keyed his car, and dumped a load of wet pig shit into the cab for having told everyone at school he'd popped her cherry in the back seat.
“She cheated on her senior math finals, snuck out and stole her grandma's piece of shit car to go to a party she shouldn't have and wrapped it around a telephone pole the same night.
“She said the worst thing she'd ever done was lie to the funeral home to say she didn't have the cash to pay for a casket and a funeral for her grandma, so the funeral home cremated her instead and Dillon kept the money to make sure she had enough to get the hell out of her two-horse town and into college.
“She confessed to putting a laxative in the precinct captain’s coffee because he wouldn't stop hitting on her or commanding her to fetch coffee when she came into interview victims.
"As for the women she was supposedly moving through a trafficking pipeline? Turns out it was part of some group dedicated to helping women escape domestic violence.
“It was her job to identify who needed the sort of help the cops couldn't provide, and if Dillon was there to translate, she could do her work right there in the station houses without anyone understanding her.
“She helped the women through an underground railroad and into safe houses where they could heal before moving on to the next link in the chain. Soon as Dillon confessed to being part of the network,Soon as Dillon confessed to being part of the network, Styles started to press her harder.
“I didn't realize until he was going at her with questions about where his wife was, that Dillon had helped Mrs. Styles and her two boys escape her husband and the abuse
