* * *
The records came back in pieces over the next six weeks, the way records do.
The Airport Authority sent the Lot E footage first, on a thumb drive in a padded envelope, with a cover letter thanking her for the preservation request and noting, a little stiffly, that the footage would otherwise have been overwritten after twenty-one days. It was wide, high, and grainy, shot from a camera on the shuttle shelter roof, and in it the whole encounter played out in miniature, two dark figures and a long pale car under a lamp. You could not see faces. But you could see the cruiser sitting dark at the end of the row for forty minutes before she arrived. You could see her walk to her car, and get in, and get out, and wave toward the shuttle. You could see the officer leave the cruiser, cross the lot at a fast walk, and reach her in eleven seconds without slowing down.
The city sent the CAD log next, then the dispatch audio, then the body camera footage, with the buffer intact. Naomi watched it at her kitchen table with a stopwatch and a legal pad, and then she watched it again, and then she wrote down one sentence and underlined it twice. Time from contact to first spoken question: zero seconds. The question and the grab had been the same act.
Last of all came the history of the stolen vehicle record, eleven pages long, the earliest of them scanned from microfiche and nearly illegible. Naomi read it slowly, with a magnifying glass that had belonged to her father. The complainant's name was on the first page. Raymond J. Brandt.
She wrote it under OPEN QUESTIONS and crossed out the question mark.
* * *
Odette and Jasmine came to her house on a Sunday afternoon in November. Naomi had invited them, and had then spent an hour beforehand cleaning a house that did not need cleaning. Jasmine walked straight past the living room and the plate of cookies and stood in the doorway to the garage, looking at the Skylark.
"Can I sit in it?"
"Driver's seat," Naomi said. "Don't touch the radio. It's been on that station since 1983 and I'm afraid of what happens if it moves."
Jasmine sat in the driver's seat with her hands on the big thin steering wheel and her eyes very wide. After a while she said, without turning around, "I thought pilots didn't get in trouble."
Naomi came and leaned on the open door. "I wasn't in trouble, baby. I didn't do anything wrong."