"Then walk with me, please, Ms. Garvey."
He did not touch her. He held out one arm, palm open, toward the cruiser at the corner, the way an usher at a church would show you to your pew, and after a long moment she took her two fingers out of the chain link—he had not seen her put them back through, but they had been there—and walked. He walked beside her, half a step behind, on the street side. They went back along the fence under the maples, through the yellow leaves. They passed the gate, where the walker parents had bunched together, and the parents went quiet as they passed, the grandfather with the cane looking at Rodney and then at the woman and then at Rodney again with an expression of mild, old-man disapproval that Rodney could not tell the direction of. One of the teenage boys said something under his breath to his brother, and the brother laughed.
At the cruiser he opened the driver's door and leaned in over the seat and woke up the laptop on its swivel mount. The screen came up gray. He typed his password with two fingers. The screen thought about it. Beside him, standing on the curb with her arms folded across her chest, the woman was not looking at him, or at the computer; she had turned her whole body around to face the school.
He brought up the BMV query and typed in her name and date of birth and the license number from the paper and hit enter, and a small blue wheel appeared in the center of the screen and began to turn.
"Come on," he said to it.
The wheel turned.
At 3:10 the bell rang. Rodney heard it through the brick of the building, a long electric drone like a stuck doorbell, and then the side doors at the east end of the building opened, the double doors that let out onto the blacktop, and the walkers came out in lines behind their teachers, a kindergarten line holding hands in pairs and a first grade line and a second grade line, all of them in jackets in a hundred colors, carrying backpacks bigger than their torsos, chattering, the noise of them rising up off the blacktop like a flock of birds getting up off a field. They moved toward the gate in their lines. Teachers walked beside the lines, holding clipboards.
The third grade line came out last. A tall young teacher at the front of it, a Black woman in a long cardigan and red-framed glasses, holding a clipboard against her chest. And behind her, fourth in line, a small girl in a purple jacket with a dark, blunt haircut, walking with her head down and her backpack straps clutched in both fists.
The girl lifted her head. She looked toward the gate. She looked past it, along the fence, to the third post past the big maple, and found nothing there, and Rodney saw her whole body go still in the line, so that the boy behind her walked into her backpack. And then she turned her head the other way, toward the corner, and she found the police cruiser with its door hanging open, and the big man in the blue uniform leaning in over the seat, and her mother standing on the curb beside it with her arms wrapped around herself.
On the laptop screen the blue wheel stopped turning and the photograph came up.