She was being as specific as a person can be, naming a phone, a card, a location, a chain of custody, offering up claims that could be checked immediately and, if false, would collapse immediately and doom her.

People do not volunteer instantly checkable specifics in a lie told to buy time.

They volunteer them when the specifics are true.

Mitchell had spent thirty years learning to hear that difference, and he heard it now, and it turned his blood cold, because if she was telling the truth, then the clock on the wall was counting down toward something monstrous.

Chapter 11 — Eleven O’Clock Tonight