Rodney let out a breath through his nose.
"Copy. En route. Show me about three minutes out."
He turned left on Mill and went up the hill.
He knew about the Winfield Elementary incident because everyone in the department knew about it, and everyone in the school district knew about it, and by now most of the parents in Ludlow Run knew a version of it that had grown in the telling to include a white van and a handgun, neither of which had been present. What had been present was this: on the Tuesday before last, at 1:15 in the afternoon, a woman had walked into the front office at Winfield Elementary on the west side of town and told the secretary that she was there to pick up a second-grader named Kaylin, that she was Kaylin's aunt, that there was a family emergency, and she had a note. The note was on lined notebook paper and was signed with the mother's name. The secretary, a woman named Pam Lowe who had worked at Winfield for nineteen years and who Rodney had known since high school, had looked at the note and looked at the woman and said, very pleasantly, that she would just need to call Mom to confirm, and had picked up the phone, and the woman had said, "Never mind," and walked out of the office and out the front doors and got into a gray four-door sedan, possibly a Malibu, possibly an Altima, and driven away before anyone thought to look at the plate.
The girl's mother, when Pam reached her at work, had never written any note. The girl had no aunt by that description. The girl did have a father, who did not have custody and was not supposed to have contact, and whose current girlfriend, according to the mother, was a white woman in her thirties with dark shoulder-length hair. The father lived in West Virginia. The father denied everything. The girlfriend had not been located. Nobody could prove that she was the woman in the office, and nobody could prove that she wasn't, and the case sat in the detective bureau with a big red question mark on it, and in the meantime the superintendent had sent a notice to every school in the district and every family, and the notice said that staff and families should be alert for an adult female, white, thirty to forty years old, approximately five foot five to five foot seven, slender build, dark hair, last seen wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans.
Half the women in Ludlow Run fit that description. Rodney's own daughter, twenty-nine and living in Columbus, fit it, minus the hoodie. But the notice had gone out, and the parents had read it, and for ten days now the dispatch center had been getting calls about women at schools: a woman in the parking lot of the middle school who turned out to be a substitute teacher eating lunch in her car, a woman photographing the elementary school on the south side who turned out to be from the company doing the new roof, a woman sitting on a bench across from Winfield who turned out to be a grandmother waiting for her grandson, who was not amused and told Rodney's partner, Officer Danae Embry, exactly what she thought of the Ludlow Run Police Department, at length, with examples.
Most of the calls were nothing. Nearly all of them. He knew that. But he also knew, the way he knew the street grid of Ludlow Run and the sound of his own truck's transmission, that the one call that wasn't nothing would sound exactly like all the ones that were. It would sound like a mom in a pickup line, a little embarrassed to be calling, saying, I'm sure it's probably nothing, but.
That was the thing about the job that nobody told you at the academy, or rather that they told you, and you wrote it down in your notebook, and you did not understand it for ten years. Nothing looked like something. Something looked like nothing. You could not tell them apart by looking. You could only tell them apart afterward.
He had learned it in the spring of 2008, on a porch on Hickory Street.
He did not think about the porch on Hickory Street every day anymore. For a few years he had thought about it every day, and then for a few years every week, and now it was more like the bad back: it came on in the afternoons, sometimes, when he was tired, and it talked to him in the same low voice. He was thinking about it now, turning onto Cordell at 2:52, because of the hoodie. Because of a woman in a gray hoodie at a school fence. Because of the way the call had come in, I'm sure it's probably nothing.