He looked over at the Tahoe. The woman behind the wheel had not lowered her phone. Behind her, the line of cars stretched down Fifth Street and around the corner and out of sight, and somebody far back in it was leaning on a horn now, not politely.
He made a decision then. It was not, he would think later, a good decision or a bad decision; it was a procedural decision, the kind he made forty times a shift, the kind that he could defend in a report. The computer in his car would let him pull the photograph from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles that went with the license for Brooke Ellen Garvey, issued nine thirty. It would take two minutes, if the computer was in a cooperative mood, which it had not been all week. If the photograph matched the face in front of him, then at least he'd know she was who the paper said. It would not tell him about the note on the file, or the ex-husband, or the other name. But it would be something with a picture on it.
"Okay," he said. "Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to ask you to walk with me to my car. You're not under arrest. You're not being detained in the back seat or anything like that. I just want to pull your license photo up on my computer, and I can't do that standing here. Then we'll go from there."
"It's three o'clock," she said.
"I know what time it is."
"She saw me with you. She saw us. She's going to be—" She stopped. He watched her decide not to say whatever she had been going to say. "If I walk to your car, she's going to see that, too."
"She's going to see her mom talking to a police officer. Kids see that every day. It's not the end of the world."
Something happened in her face when he said that, something he would remember afterward, a kind of flinch and a kind of laugh at once, there and gone. "Not this kid," she said. "Not with a police officer. You don't know."
"Then tell me."
She shook her head.