1.
Kalinda's not sure how many hours she's been here—her phone is sealed in a plastic bag behind the arresting officer's desk, along with her necklace, her wallet, and the switchblade from the sole of her boot that inspired a much more thorough and disturbing pat-down—and the fierce anger that had been twisting through her since Cary ordered her cuffed has lapsed away, given way to something quieter and more insidious. She keeps her spine straight, glancing sidelong at the slumping blonde form of the clearly intoxicated woman on the bench perpendicular to hers. Three women have come and gone from the holding cell in the time Kalinda's been sitting here. Vagrants, misdemeanors. Something clicks in the back of Kalinda's throat, and she swallows convulsively against it, her hands in her pockets, resolutely still. This is the only way she can think of not to pace until she has ground the heels of her boots to powder. The cement blocks of the walls, the bars, the helplessness, it's almost enough to make her scared, enough to make her hurt, enough to make her visible. It's almost enough to undo Kalinda.
Every cop Kalinda has cajoled over the years, every lawyer she's gazed at through lowered lashes, every protective measure she has taken, she's done so that she wouldn't end up caged, completely at the mercy of someone else who's decided to hate her. No one is coming to help Kalinda (she thinks, with a wrench of self-pity she would not for a second countenance in anyone else); while that's been true for a long time, she's taken pains to ensure that it wouldn't matter. It mattered to Leela, and Kalinda wouldn't wish Leela on anyone, least of all herself. Leela's neediness her old life, and it ruined Alicia, and here it is, once again, chokeholding Kalinda and obscuring her vision.
She hears the danger of losing control, and starts running down her options in her head. She'd told Cary this wouldn't stand up, and she knows it to be true; she's not looking at a felony conviction, and this is nowhere near as bad as it could be. But she needs to find someone who can send gossip Diane's way—she left a message on Will's phone, which alone demonstrates that she wasn't thinking clearly. In a situation like this, you call the more reliable partner, the one not distracted by his own impending indictment. She wanted Diane to think better of her, she realizes with some frustration. Will already understands what she's like, what Cary's like. To him none of this would make a difference.
Well, now she knows. But unless Lockhart/Gardner get the word soon she'll be taken down to 26th and California without representation. Into her head flies the image of Donna Seabrook as her public defender; she's about to laugh when Dana walks in, wearing a replica of Kalinda's blue leather jacket.
Kalinda rises with deliberation, imagining a conflict brewing between Cary and his lady love over her arrest, imagining that all the drinks she's had with ASA Lodge have served a purpose. Her shrug when Dana asks how she's doing is infused with a gentleness that she has noticed tends to make Dana's eyes linger a bit longer at the bar, her Freudian slips increase.
"'Cause you're looking a little pale."
Kalinda stays silent, turns her back to the cell door. She's been outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and she doesn't want to see any more of Dana's triumphant smirk than she's already been subjected to.
And then she's in a maze of cement hallways, her wrists once again cuffed, some young giant of an officer keeping one hand firmly on her shoulder, one a little too low on her back. She's hovered at the door while Alicia talks to her pro bono clients enough to know what this means: another day, maybe two or three, "out of circulation," in Cary's words. She should have read this plan twitching at the corners of Dana's lips, bouncing off her eyelids—it seems that lately she wants things so much she's started to look for them. It is the worst professional and personal quality she could possibly have, and it has to stop. Kalinda rolls her eyes, dismissing the forming tears to the back of her skull. Two or three days, their clients have handled worse, even Leela handled worse. Kalinda should be able to take it.
The officer steering her hands her off to his colleague, a woman this time. She flicks dull eyes over Kalinda, leads her into a small holding cell with a steel door, a cement bench, and a high and narrow plexiglass window reinforced with chicken wire, informs her in a monotone that the van will be here within the hour, and leaves the cuffs on as she locks the door behind her.
Kalinda's shoulders are cramping. There's not much she can do about that. Once again she loses track of time, wondering if they actually intend to take her to a hospital, wondering where the shuffled lawyerless clients do end up, incredulous that she has never bothered to find out. Donna is starting to seem like a better and better option, which is how Kalinda knows that she's stopped thinking rationally, that she's in trouble. Knowing which bridges she can still cross, and which she's burned, is one of the qualities that makes her good at her job. One that would make her better, she thinks, would be burning fewer bridges. Through her brain ticks a list of people she has lost, Cary's name now added to it. She only partially registers it when the cell door thuds open.
"You've got company," the officer says.
Kalinda steels herself, and the officer puts a hand under her arm to haul her up. She steers Kalinda through the open door, out past the desk, and when Kalinda sees who is in the hallway she stops dead, thinking that a Cook County prison van to the hospital might well have been a better idea.