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"No," Torres says.

She takes a notebook out of her bag, opens it on the table, and uncaps a pen. She waits until I put the glass down.

"S.H. is Steve Hendricks," she says. "He was director of livestock transport for the rodeo association that runs the circuit out west. His office approved every hauler on that circuit and signed every route exception. A director's exception went out under his own name, so nobody at a gate would look in the back of a trailer carrying one. He's in federal custody, and so is his brother Burl. Their indictment is public record."

I've carried the initials S.H. since that barn without knowing whose they were. My lips shape his name without any sound: Steve Hendricks. He's a man with a whole name and an office and a stamp, and he's sitting in a cell. My hands go still in my lap, and for a second I can't feel them at all.

"Penny got those lines secondhand from you," Torres says. "You got it straight from the woman who sat in that cab. You didn't hear the driver yourself, though. What you can tell them is how Sandy's words came to you, where, and when. That helps me find the paper and the people who can prove the rest."

"What do you need from me?"

"The Hendricks brothers are charged, but the prosecutor isn't done. He's adding charges, and he's going after the men who used those routes. He may need you in front of a grand jury. A grand jury is a room of ordinary citizens. They hear the government's witnesses in private, with no defense lawyer in the room, and they decide whether there's enough to charge a man."

She gives me a second with that before she goes on. "If it goes to trial, the prosecutor may want you on the stand too. A trial is held in open court, and the defense lawyer gets to question you about what you say."

Sandy said if any of us ever got out, somebody had to say those words to a cop. She never said anything about a courtroom, but she'd have walked into one and said it to the judge's face.

"Yes," I say. "Both."

"Whether they call you is the prosecutor's decision, not mine," Torres says. "I'll tell him you said yes."

Torres turns to a fresh page and asks where they took me when they moved me out of that barn.

I tell her in order, without stopping. I tell her about the trailer with CLOVIS painted on its side, the back gate that rattled loose, and the dark highway shoulder I dropped onto. I tell her Dutch found me in a ditch the next day and finished his cigar over me before he put his boot on my ankle.

I tell her he took me to a cellar under a winery on a limestone hill in Gillespie County, and that I was down there a few weeks. The night I got out, I ran through a barrel room with a circle and a shepherd's crook burned into every barrel head.

"Whose winery?" she asks.

"Coleman Whitlock's. I drew that brand on Knox's arm, and he read it as Whitlock's."

I look at Knox, and he tells her the rest.

"It was at the county fairgrounds last spring," he tells Torres. "They held a benefit auction for the volunteer fire department. There was a pallet of retired barrels with that brand on every head, and Whitlock took the bids on it himself. The fire department ought to still have the sale sheet."

"Last Sunday, Coleman turned around in my father's church and talked to me," I say. "I knew his voice. Down there, he sat in the corner where the lamp didn't reach. He never touched anybody. He's the one who ordered me onto the truck."

"Did you ever see his face in that cellar?"

"He wore a mask. They all did."

Torres nods, and for once she doesn't write anything down.

"Were there other women down there?" she asks.

"The cells along that hall emptied out on transfer nights and filled up again later with girls I'd never seen. A truck backed into a tunnel at the end of the hall. The night I ran, a stock trailer sat idling on the gravel service road at the mouth of that tunnel, below the building. I heard the men say through the bars that the trucks took the girls to brothels in Mexico."

"You went from that barn into a Clovis trailer, and from the ditch into that cellar," Torres says. "If you're right about the trucks, that cellar is a stop on the Hendricks routes. Right now I can't prove it."

Her next question is the one I've been waiting for. "Why did he keep you there instead of putting you on a truck?"

"My father signed a gambling marker, and Coleman bought it and called it in. I thought he kept me to squeeze Daddy, but Daddy never sent a dime. On transfer nights, Coleman let his partners use me in the cigar room to work off the debt."

"Who did Whitlock buy the marker from?"

"I don't know. My father won't even tell me what he bet on."

At the head of the table, Knox's right hand comes off his belt and lands on the tabletop. His fingers spread wide on the wood, and he presses down until his fingertips go white.