It was nothing like that.

It was administrators speaking in even tones.

It was a nurse making an ordinary-looking phone call.

It was a delivery quietly reassigned on a whiteboard, a camera feed reviewed behind a closed door, a drawer opened by men in plain clothes who did not hurry.

The professionals who do this work understand something I had to learn on the fly: that the loud version is the dangerous version, that a cornered man who realizes he is caught is far more likely to do something desperate than a comfortable man who believes his plan is still perfectly on track.

So they let Beckett go on believing.