"Then who are you with?"
"Nobody, this morning," she said. "Myself."
"I'm going to need to see some identification."
He heard himself say it. He heard how it sounded in that low gray room, with the hum of the coffee urn and the radiator ticking and Sandoval at his desk across the lobby, and he did not stop. There was a machine in him that had been built over thirty-four years, and once it started it ran the length of its track, and he had stopped noticing, a long time ago, that it was a machine.
The woman looked at him for a moment longer. Then she reached down into the canvas tote between her feet, slowly, keeping her other hand flat on the envelope, and he watched her hand go in, because thirty-four years did not let him not watch it, and it came out with a small wallet of worn brown leather, and she opened the wallet and slid out a driver's license and held it out to him between two fingers.
He took it. Massachusetts. ANTOINETTE L. REDDICK. An address in Randolph. A date of birth that made her forty-eight. The photograph showed her in the same reading-glass chain, the beads bright even in the gray light of the registry camera, and she was not smiling in it, but she looked like a woman who had been about to.
"Reddick," he said.
"That's right."
The name meant nothing to him. He turned the card over as if the back would tell him something, which it never did, it never had, not once in his whole career; it was just a gesture, the gesture of a man who held the card and therefore held the conversation. He turned it back.
"Ms. Reddick," he said, "what's in the envelope?"