In the spring of 2008 he had been five years on the job. He had gotten a call to a house on Hickory Street, a babysitter calling, a nineteen-year-old college girl who watched a six-year-old boy named Trey Pomeroy three afternoons a week while his mother worked at the hospital. The babysitter said there was a man at the door who said he was Trey's father and wanted to take Trey for the afternoon, and he seemed nice, and Trey knew him, but Trey's mom hadn't said anything about it, and she couldn't reach Trey's mom, and she didn't know what to do. So Rodney had driven over. And there had been a man on the porch, a pleasant, sandy-haired man of about thirty-five in a Columbus Clippers ball cap and khakis, with his hands in his pockets, and he had smiled at Rodney and said, "Officer, I'm sorry she had to call you, this is all just a misunderstanding, I'm his dad."
And Rodney had asked for his ID, and the man had produced it right away, an Ohio license with a Columbus address and the name GREGORY MERRICK POMEROY on it, and Rodney had compared the face on the card to the face on the porch, and they matched. And the boy had come to the screen door behind the babysitter and said, "Daddy," in a small voice, not excited exactly but not scared either. And Rodney had called it in, and dispatch had run the name and come back with no warrants and no wants. And the man had said, "Look, I've got shared custody, it's my weekend, she just forgot to tell the sitter, she does this, I can show you the paperwork, it's at home in Columbus," and Rodney had looked at the man and the ID and the boy saying Daddy through the screen and had thought: It's a civil matter. It's a custody squabble. It's not my business to referee. And he had told the babysitter, gently, that there wasn't anything he could do to stop a father from picking up his son, that if there was a dispute the parents would have to take it up with the court. And the babysitter had cried a little and packed Trey's backpack with his Spider-Man pajamas and his inhaler, and the man had thanked Rodney, warmly, shaken his hand, and put the boy in a blue Pontiac and driven away.
The custody order had been modified eleven days earlier. Gregory Pomeroy's visitation had been suspended pending a psychological evaluation after he'd threatened, in a voicemail his ex-wife had played for the magistrate, to take the boy somewhere she'd never find him. The modified order had not yet made it into any database Rodney could see from a porch on Hickory Street. It was a piece of paper in a file in a courthouse in Franklin County. And the license had been real, and the face had been real, and the boy had said Daddy, and none of it had meant a thing.
They found Trey Pomeroy fourteen months later, living in a trailer outside Fort Smith, Arkansas, enrolled in a school there under the name Tyler Merrick. His father had dyed the boy's hair black. When they brought the boy back to Ohio, he did not speak for a long time. Rodney had heard that from Pam Lowe, actually, whose sister-in-law had been the boy's teacher when he came back. He doesn't talk, Pam had said. Not at all. Not to anyone. They don't know if it's the trauma or what. Rodney had been at a cookout when he heard it, holding a paper plate with a hamburger on it, and he had put the plate down on the picnic table and walked to his truck and sat in it for a while with the door open.
Nobody had blamed him. That was the hell of it. His sergeant had said, You followed procedure, Rod. The chief had said the same. The boy's mother had never said anything to him at all, which was worse. He had followed procedure. He had looked at a valid ID and a matching face and a child who knew the man and had made a reasonable determination, and the determination had been wrong, and a six-year-old had spent fourteen months in a trailer in Arkansas answering to a name that wasn't his.
What he had learned, on that porch, was this: an ID did not tell you who a person was. It told you what a person had been able to get printed. A name was a thing anyone could say. A face was a thing anyone could have. Paper was paper.
He had been a different kind of police officer since then. Some of his colleagues would have said a better one, more careful, more thorough. Some would have said a worse one, a harder one, a man who did not give the benefit of the doubt. Trudy, his wife, said that he had stopped believing people, and she did not say it as a compliment. You used to come home and tell me about the people you met, she had said once, a few years ago, in the kitchen, with her back to him, washing a pan. Now you just tell me about the ones who lied.
He pulled up to the corner of Cordell and Fifth at 2:52 and saw the white Tahoe in the car line, and the woman in the driver's seat lifted one hand off the steering wheel at him and pointed with her whole arm, like a woman flagging down a cab, down the length of the fence.
He followed the arm. He saw her.
She was standing by herself about forty yards past the big maple, on the sidewalk, at the fence, with her back mostly to him and her face turned up toward the building. Slender. Dark hair, short. Gray hooded sweatshirt, zipped. Dark pants, not jeans, but the notice could have been wrong about the jeans; witnesses were usually wrong about pants. A canvas bag over one shoulder. She was not near the gate, where the walker parents gathered. She was not near anyone at all. She was standing at the one stretch of fence where nobody else was standing, and she was looking at the building as though it owed her something.