There was a pause. “There’s an all-night diner off Route 19. Blue sign. Bad coffee. Back booth.”
“I know it.”
Mitchell hung up and placed the photograph inside a plain folder. Before leaving, he opened his office safe and removed copies of the evidence transfer pages. He paused at the door, looking back once at the room he had occupied for twelve years.
The prison outside his office hummed with its midnight rhythm. Men slept behind concrete walls. Guards walked their routes. Somewhere in the unit, Gavin Cole was breathing under the strange and fragile protection of a stay order.
Mitchell slipped the folder under his coat and stepped into the corridor.
For the first time in decades, he felt less like a warden than a witness.
The diner off Route 19 was almost empty.
A truck driver sat at the counter stirring sugar into coffee. An elderly waitress refilled ketchup bottles near the register. Rain ticked against the windows in thin, slanted lines, blurring the parking lot lights into halos.
