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"Monday night," I tell her. "Late."

Knox stands at the back of the ambulance the whole time. When she finishes, he tells her Nell's doctor can see me in the morning, if I want to go.

I want to go. I want this hand back more than I want to prove I don't need anything from him.

Down the drive, the partners sit in the backs of separate cars with their masks gone. Wendell Ochs has his forehead pressed against the window glass. Curtis Lindner is talking to nobody with the door shut. Harold Fenske sits up straight and stares ahead with his chin up, like none of this has anything to do with him.

A pair of agents walks Whitlock out the front door and down the steps between them.

Daddy preached from Numbers one Sunday when I was little. Be sure your sin will find you out. He never mentioned it might take a year of my life and a preacher's daughter with a mallet.

Whitlock's silver hair hangs over his forehead. His shirt has come untucked on one side, and the shirtsleeves he turned back so neatly every Sunday are black with soot.

His left hand is swelling purple inside the handcuff.

I step into his path.

The agents stop. One of them looks past me at Torres. She lifts a hand, and they hold him where he is.

"Look at me," I tell him.

He looks at the vine rows over my shoulder.

"You sat in that corner every transfer night and watched," I say. "You can look at me for one minute."

His eyes come down to my face. Up close, he's an old man in handcuffs with his hair in his eyes, and I'm not afraid of him.

Knox has moved to stand a step off my shoulder, where Whitlock can see him over it. Knox keeps his mouth shut and his hands at his sides.

If Whitlock wants to look anywhere but at me, the only other thing he'll find is Knox.

I keep my eyes on Whitlock and talk to Torres.

"Ochs held the crop," I say. "Lindner passes the plate down the fourth pew at my daddy's church and clears his throat before he laughs. Fenske talks like he's standing up at a commission meeting. The man in the fourth chair hardly said a word, and I'd bet my life his name is in your book. Rusk. This man sat in the dark corner and decided what happened to every one of us."

Torres doesn't stop me. She watches Whitlock's face while I talk, and she writes in her notebook.

Whitlock's mouth opens, and I talk over him.

"There was a woman named Sandy Canutson," I tell him. "On the Thornton routes, before they ever brought me to your cellar, they kept us in a barn with a plywood floor. One time they moved some of us, and Sandy had to ride up front in the truck. It sat idling at a gate, and she heard the driver say something on his phone. She made every girl in that barn learn it word for word."

I say it to his face the way Sandy made us say it.

"It was a director's exception. S.H. signed it himself. Nobody at the gate opens a director's exception."

His eyes jump to Torres and back to me.

"Sandy taught it to me," I say. "I taught it to Penny the night before they moved me. Penny carried it out and gave it to Agent Torres, and those words pointed her at the man who signed those trucks through the gates." I lean closer. "Tonight I'm telling her where the girls in those trucks ended up. In your cellar, in the back of Gil's trailer, and on our knees in front of the men who sat in your leather chairs."

"That goes to the prosecutor," Torres says behind me. "It helps the government's case against Hendricks. It doesn't close it, and Strackbein in cuffs doesn't close it either. But it's evidence the prosecutor didn't have this morning."

Whitlock's lips are pressed tight and pale. His eyes haven't left me since they came back from Torres.

"My name is Delilah Ruth King," I tell him. "Sandy made me say it every night so I wouldn't forget who I was. You can practice saying it in your cell."

I step out of his way. The agents walk him toward the nearest car.

They pass a white pickup parked beside the tasting room, apart from the federal cars. It's new and clean, without a speck of caliche dust on it.