I was not; I already grasped, in broad strokes, what had been done.

I was gathering evidence.

Every question I asked was a prompt, an invitation for them to say the incriminating thing aloud, into a microphone they did not know was there.

Their arrogance, the very arrogance that made them cruel, was also what made them talkative, and their talkativeness was the rope I handed them, one careful question at a time.

They thought they were lecturing a defeated woman about how thoroughly they had beaten her.