"Sir, I need you to stay back."
"I'm staying back. I'm right here. I'm Hector Ruiz, I'm the overnight crew chief for Meridian, I marshalled her in an hour ago." He held up his own badge. "I parked that airplane. B9. You can call ops. She's a captain. She's been a captain for years."
"The vehicle's flagged stolen."
"That car?" Hector laughed, once, in disbelief. "That car's been parked out here every week for a month. Her dad's car. He used to bring it to the airport car show. He won the thing twice."
"Sir. Stay back."
Hector stayed back. He took out his phone, held it up so the officer could see it plainly, and said, "I'm not interfering. I'm just recording." The officer looked at him a long moment and turned away.
Odette had walked over by then, with Jasmine holding tightly to the back of her coat. The three of them stood together at the edge of the lamplight. Through the cruiser's window, Naomi could see them. She met Hector's eyes and nodded, once, and she met Odette's eyes and shook her head very slightly, a gesture that meant take her home, and Odette, who understood, bent down and spoke into her daughter's ear.
Jasmine did not want to go. Naomi could see that, too. The girl stood planted, staring at the back of the cruiser with her jaw set, her notebook clutched against her chest the way another child might clutch a stuffed animal.
The sergeant arrived at twelve fifty-two. Naomi knew because she had been keeping a running log in her head the whole while, the way she had been trained in survival school. The sergeant was a heavyset woman in her fifties named Amaro, with reading glasses pushed up into her gray hair, and she talked to Officer Brandt for four minutes with her back turned, and then she got into the front seat of her own car and typed on the laptop for six minutes, and then she got out and came and opened the back door of the cruiser.
"Ma'am," she said. "Captain. Can you step out for me?"
Naomi stepped out. Sergeant Amaro took the handcuffs off herself.
"That record," she said, "is forty-seven years old. It came over in the database migration last spring. It should have been purged in about 1986. There's a flag on it that says the original complaint was disposed and nobody ever went back and cleared the vehicle." She took a breath. "You're not under arrest. You're free to go. I'm sorry for the inconvenience."
"Inconvenience," Naomi said.