Mulcahy had worked the overnight desk for eleven years. She had grown up in Wickham Falls. She knew whose house was on Quarry Lane. Everybody over forty in this town knew whose house was on Quarry Lane, and every one of them, Conor suddenly understood, had probably known for years about the car that drove down it at eight miles an hour and never stopped.
"Twelve-fifty-four," he said.
"Twelve-fifty-four," said Mulcahy, and then, after a pause so short that anyone else would not have noticed it, "Copy that, Conor."
She had never once in eleven years called him Conor on the air.
He opened the front passenger door of the cruiser for her. Solange saw what was on the seat, a clipboard and a cold coffee cup from Stewart's and a box of nitrile gloves and a paperback with its cover torn off, and she saw him look at it too, as if he had not known it was there, and then he gathered it all up in one armful and dumped it in the back, behind the cage, where she would not sit.
"Front," he said. "If that's all right."
"That is all right," she said.
The car smelled of coffee and wet wool and the hot dust smell of the heater. On the computer screen between the seats her name still glowed, AUGUSTIN, SOLANGE. He saw her looking and touched something and it went away. She held the box on her lap with both hands, the way she had held it on the train.
They did not talk. He turned the spotlight off and the road went dark around them except for the headlights, and he pulled out and drove up Ridge Road through the rain, past the Whitford house, where a light came on in an upstairs window as they passed and then, a moment later, went off again. The wipers went back and forth. The leaves came down. At the top of the hill he slowed, and put on his turn signal, though there was no one on the road to see it, and turned onto Quarry Lane.