He looked at her. She looked back. Neither of them blinked. And then, over his shoulder, in the third window from the left on the second floor, the blinds went up the rest of the way with a jerk, and there was a face there.
Rodney saw her see it. That was how he knew to turn around: something went across the woman's face like the shadow of a bird crossing a lawn, and he turned and looked up, and there in the third window from the left on the second floor of Cordell Street Elementary was a small child with her two hands flat against the glass.
It was a girl, eight or nine, with dark hair cut blunt at the chin and bangs that needed trimming. She was too far away for him to make out her expression. He could make out her hands, pale starfish on the glass, and the way she held completely still. Other children moved behind her in the classroom, small shapes going back and forth, chairs going up on desks. The girl in the window did not move. She was looking down at the sidewalk, at the fence, at the third post past the maple, at her mother and a police officer standing there, and she did not wave, and she did not move, for a count of perhaps four seconds.
And then she was gone. Not gradually, not called away; gone, all at once, as though someone had yanked a string, and the blinds swung a little in the space where she had been.
"Oh, God," the woman said, under her breath. It was not said to him. "Oh, baby, no."
So that much was true, then. There was a window, and there was a girl in it at three o'clock, and the girl knew where to look. Rodney noted it. He noted also that it did not prove anything he needed proved. The man on Hickory Street had been known to the child, too. Children knew people. Children looked out of windows for people who were not supposed to have them. He had worked a case in 2016 in which a girl of ten had climbed out of a bathroom window at her grandmother's house in the middle of the night to meet her mother at the end of the block, a mother who had lost custody for very good reasons and who had taught her daughter over the course of a year of supervised visits exactly how and when to climb. Children loved whoever they loved. It was not evidence.
"Fourteen," he said into his shoulder, keeping his eyes on her. "Can you have someone call over to the front office at Cordell Street Elementary. I need to confirm the parent or guardian on file for a third grade student, first name Juno, J-U-N-O, last name Garvey. Ms. Oduya's class."
"Copy, Fourteen. Stand by."
He watched the woman while they waited. She was not watching him anymore. She was watching the window, which was empty, and her hands were opening and closing at her sides in a way that he did not think she knew about. He had seen a lot of people's hands do a lot of things over the years. Liars' hands tended to go to their faces, their necks, their pockets; they tended to want to cover something up. This woman's hands did not want to cover anything. They looked like they wanted to hold on to something and could not find it.
He thought about his wife in the kitchen with her back to him. Now you just tell me about the ones who lied.