"You told me it was stolen. It was stolen sixteen years ago. That's not a reason. That's history."
And he laughed again. It was the third time, and it was different from the first two; there was nothing in it at all, no amusement, not even contempt, only a kind of exhausted disbelief, as if somebody had told him the last joke in the world and it was the same as all the others.
"History," he said. "Yeah. Okay. That's good. You know what, lady, I don't care what the paper says. Paper says whatever somebody pays it to say. I've been doing this almost thirty years. I know how this goes. A car like this, a car somebody—" he stopped, and started again, and it came out of him in a rush, low and ugly— "and it ends up with somebody who comes over here and opens a shop on Morgan Ford with cash out of a shoebox and puts their wife behind the counter in a—"
He stopped. He did not finish it. He did not have to finish it; she could see the end of the sentence in the place where his eyes went, which was to her scarf and away.
She did not set that one down. She found she could not. She stood with it in her hands, heavy, hot, and she understood that she was angry in a way she had not let herself be angry in years, maybe since she was a girl in the apartment on Itaska Street listening to her father come home and not say anything for two days. Her hand was shaking around the key. She let it shake.
Then she turned her back on him.
It was the one thing her father's list did not say to do, and it was, she would think later, the only thing on the list or off it that would have worked. She turned her back on the sergeant and stepped to the driver's door and put the key into the lock, the plain steel blade into the slot under the chrome handle, and turned it.
There was the pause. And then, all around the car, every lock button rose at once, with the long soft sound of the vacuum letting go, like a breath held for a long time and finally let out.
Behind her she heard him make a sound. She could not have said what kind of sound. It was very small.
She opened the door and stood in the angle of it with one hand on the top of the frame and turned around.
"There," she said. "That's my key. That's my car. Now I'm going to tell you what I see, Sergeant, and then you can decide what you want to do." She took a breath and kept her voice level. It came out lower than she meant it to. "You sat in your car for four minutes before you came over here. I watched you. You ran my plate, and it came back to me, because if it had come back stolen you'd have called another car and you would not be standing six feet from me with your hands on your belt. You'd have one hand on your gun. You didn't turn on your lights. You haven't said one word into your radio since you got out of that car, not my plate, not this location, not anything. You walked around my car before you even looked at me. You put your fingers in the dent. You read the number off the dash like you already knew it by heart." She watched his face, and his face told her she was right, and she went on. "I don't know what this is. But it isn't police work. So go ahead. Pick up your radio. Tell your supervisor what you're doing."