The memorial service had been in September, in a chapel in Arlington with rain that day too, rain that tapped the tall windows like fingers trying to get in. Naomi had wanted to be cremated; she had said so once, laughing, over Thai food in Crystal City, and he had remembered it because remembering was all he had left. There had been a flag, because the contractor had pulled strings, because she had been "attached," because the words got blurry at the edges. A chaplain who had never met her said the right things in the right order. Her supervisor from the contractor, a man with a soft voice and a hard smile, had gripped Elias's hand and said she was a valued member of the team, and Elias had looked into that man's eyes and seen nothing, which was itself a kind of information. Their mother had not come. Their mother had not left her house in Roanoke in six years, not since the stroke, and the nurses had held the phone to her ear during the service, and Elias had spoken to her afterward and heard the wet sound of her breathing and said nothing about tire marks.
He remembered standing at the reception afterward with a paper plate of food he did not eat, wearing these same dress blues, and watching the contractor people cluster in their dark suits, and thinking, with a clarity that frightened him, that one of the people in this room knew. Not suspected. Knew. He had scanned their faces the way he scanned a manifest for discrepancies, and every face was smooth, and that smoothness was the discrepancy. Grief has texture. Theirs had none.
The envelope in his pocket contained copies. Photographs of the tire marks, with his tape measure in the frame for scale. The witness statements, annotated. The maintenance log for the camera, showing the eleven-minute gap, and the facility's own incident report, which contradicted the state troopers' report on the time of the camera's restoration by seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes. Someone had lied on paper, and paper was where Elias lived. He had written a cover letter, two pages, in language so careful it had taken him nine drafts, because he was accusing no one by name and everyone by implication, and the Inspector General's office was three blocks away through this rain.
He checked his watch. 1420 hours. The IG office closed at 1600. He had time. He had stood under this awning for eleven minutes — the number surfaced in his mind unbidden and he pushed it away — telling himself he was waiting for the rain to ease, which was a lie. The rain was not going to ease. He was waiting for courage, which was a worse lie, because he had courage. He had carried men. He had stood in a motor pool in Kandahar while rockets walked toward him and finished the inventory. What he was waiting for was certainty, and certainty was not coming, and he knew it, and that was why his feet were not moving.
Then the patrol car pulled up to the curb, and everything changed.
It was a Bellweather town police cruiser, white and blue, rain beading on the light bar, wipers working at full speed. It stopped at the curb with its nose angled slightly toward him, the way cruisers stopped when the officer inside had already decided something. Elias watched it through the rain with the detached, professional interest of a man who had seen vehicles stop like that in other countries, in other contexts, and had learned that the angle of approach told you the intention before the door opened.
The door opened. The officer who stepped out was a woman in her late thirties, rain beading on her dark uniform, her hand resting near her belt in a posture that was not quite a threat and was absolutely a statement. She came around the front of the cruiser without hurrying, her boots splashing in the gutter runoff, and stopped six feet from the awning's edge, close enough that he could see the rain running off the brim of her cap. Her face was trained to reveal little. Elias had seen that face before, on MPs, on gate guards, on junior officers trying to look older than they were. It was the face of someone who had rehearsed this.
"Officer Dana Mercer," she said. "Bellweather PD. Sir, I need to see some identification."
Elias did not move. Twelve years had taught him the choreography of authority, and something in this choreography was off. He was standing under a courthouse awning, in full dress uniform, in the middle of a weekday afternoon, doing nothing. There was no crowd. There was no disturbance. There was only rain.
"Captain Elias Reed, United States Army," he said. He kept his voice level, the way he had been taught to speak to people who were frightened or posturing. "Is there a problem, Officer?"
"We had a report," Mercer said. "Someone trying door handles along this block. You match the description."
Elias looked down the block. The block was empty except for rain. The courthouse doors were twenty feet behind him, locked — it was a county holiday, some obscure observance, which was why the awning had been empty and why he had chosen this spot to think. The shops across the street were shuttered against the weather. There was no one trying door handles. There had been no one to see him try door handles, because he had not moved from this spot in eleven minutes.
"Officer," he said, "I've been standing here. Under the awning. I haven't touched a door."
"Sir, I still need to see your ID."
He reached slowly for his wallet, the inside pocket, the one without the envelope — he was careful about that, his fingers finding the leather by memory — and produced his military identification card and his driver's license. He held them out. Mercer took them without looking at them. That was the second thing that was wrong. An officer who wanted identification looked at the identification. Mercer held the cards in her hand and looked at him.
"Turn around," she said. "Hands behind your back."
The rain seemed to get louder. Elias felt the envelope against his ribs, over his heart, sealed and waiting. He thought of Naomi's voice on the phone: the numbers don't move the way they're supposed to move. He thought of the tire marks that did not match the vehicle's final position. He thought, with a sudden cold clarity, that this was not a mistake.
"Officer Mercer," he said. "I'm a captain in the United States Army. I'm in full dress uniform, standing under a courthouse awning, in the rain. On what grounds are you detaining me?"
"Sir," she said, and her hand moved from near her belt to her belt, and the cuffs were in her hand, "don't make this difficult."
It was not an answer. It was a script. Elias had heard scripts before — in briefings, in investigations, in the mouths of men who had been told what to say. He turned around slowly, because the alternative was a scene, and a scene was what someone wanted. He put his hands behind his back. The cuffs closed around his wrists with a double click that he felt in his teeth. Metal, cold even through the rain-warmed air. Twelve years of service, two deployments, a Bronze Star, and he was standing handcuffed under a courthouse awning in Bellweather, Virginia, while the rain came down.