As he watched, she took her hands out of the front pocket of the sweatshirt, slowly, and let them hang at her sides, and did not look around at him. That was the thing he noticed most. Every person he had ever pulled up on in twenty-three years looked at the car. Innocent people looked at the car because they were curious, and guilty people looked at the car because they were scared. This woman heard a police vehicle stop forty yards away and took her hands out of her pocket, slow, like someone who had been taught how, and kept her eyes on the building.
He put the cruiser in park and left it running and keyed his shoulder mic. "Fourteen, on scene, Cordell Street Elementary. Making contact with one female."
"Copy, Fourteen."
He got out. He turned his radio down a notch. His back said something rude to him as he straightened up, and he ignored it. He walked down the sidewalk under the maples, through a little drift of yellow leaves that crunched under his boots, and he stopped about eight feet behind her and a little to one side, where he could see her hands.
"Afternoon, ma'am," he said.
Brooke turned around.
He was older than she had expected from the sound of his boots, fifty or so, a big man going soft around the middle the way big men did when they had spent twenty years in a car. He had a gray crew cut and a gray mustache, trimmed straight across, and a face that was red across the cheekbones from sun or blood pressure or both, and pale blue eyes that were looking not at her face but at her hands, and then at the canvas bag, and then at her face. His name tag said PRENTICE. He wore the dark blue uniform of the city police, not the tan and brown of a sheriff's deputy, and she was ashamed of how much that mattered to her, how her whole body unclenched a quarter of an inch when she saw the blue.
"Afternoon," she said.
"Can I ask what you're doing out here today?"
"I'm waiting for my daughter. She's in the third grade."