A pause. The click of keys. "Negative, two-one. Says dark coat, dark complexion, female, carrying a, quote, package. Says subject did not appear to be a resident."
Conor drove. The road went up through the trees in long curves, no sidewalks, no streetlights, the stone walls on either side gray in his headlights and the leaves coming down across the beams like slow yellow snow. He went through it in his head the way they had taught him: approach, observe, articulable facts. Time of night. Location. Pattern. The train. The box. And he thought, too, because he was not a stupid man, and because he had been to the trainings and sat through the slides and the role-plays and the instructor from the state saying in a gentle voice that bias is not a moral failing, it is a shortcut the brain takes, and our job is to notice when we're taking it, he thought: dark complexion, did not appear to be a resident. He thought: Mrs. Whitford would call in Jesus Christ walking up Ridge Road if he were carrying a box. He knew that.
He also knew that a woman had lain six hours on a kitchen floor on Old Church Road with her hip in two pieces listening to her own clocks tick.
He came around the long curve below the Whitford house and his headlights found her.
She was walking on the narrow strip of dirt and leaves between the edge of the asphalt and the stone wall, northbound, with her back to him, the way you were not supposed to walk, with traffic instead of against it. She was not tall. Her coat was long and dark gray, buttoned to the throat. She had a bag on her right shoulder and she was carrying something in her left arm, something white, held against her body, and when his headlights hit her she did not turn around and she did not stop and she did not speed up. She simply kept walking, one foot and then the other, steady, as if the light were weather.
He pulled up behind her, ten yards back, and put the car in park and hit the spotlight, and the white beam of it fell across her and threw her shadow up the road ahead of her long and thin and black, and she stopped.
He got out. He left the door open. He touched the button on his chest that started the camera, the way he did a hundred times a week, without thinking, and he said, in the voice he used, not unfriendly, not friendly either, a voice like a hand held up flat:
"Evening, ma'am. Wickham Falls police. Can you turn around for me?"
Solange had known the car was behind her for a quarter of a mile before the light came on. She had heard the tires on the wet leaves, slow, too slow for a car that was going somewhere, and she had seen her own shadow come up faint in front of her as the headlights rounded the curve, and she had known. She had not turned around. Turning around was a question, and she had nothing to ask. She had kept walking with the box against her ribs and her eyes on the road ahead where it went up into the dark, and she had said to herself in Kreyòl, in her mother's voice, the thing her mother used to say when the soldiers set up a roadblock on the Jacmel road and made everybody get off the bus: Pa kouri. Pa kriye. Pa bliye non ou. Don't run. Don't cry. Don't forget your name.
When the spotlight hit her, the world went white. The stone wall beside her turned the color of bone. Her shadow went up the road ahead of her like something trying to escape. She stopped walking, because there was nowhere left to put her feet that she could see.