It’s almost six o’clock at the end of their first day on the Preserve. To Judy, this math doesn’t compute. She feels as if she’s been there for a year.

Hayes is driving north to BCI headquarters at Ray Brook. After that, she’ll start the long drive to Schenectady. The thought makes her want to cry.

“Tired?” says Hayes.

“A little.”

“Get ready,” says Hayes. “Case like this, you’ll be working around the clock.”

He rolls down the window. Shakes a pack of cigarettes in his hand, offering one to Judy, who declines.

“Don’t smoke?”

“No.”

“That’s good,” says Hayes. “My old man died from it, I think. He didn’t call it cancer, but he sure died coughing.”

He pulls from it. Blows a plume of smoke sideways out the open window. “I only smoke in the car. That’s my compromise with myself.”

Judy gives a weak laugh. Just enough to demonstrate that she’s been listening.

“Can I ask you something?” says Hayes, and Judy tenses, expecting something personal. It will be a very long time before Judy feels at ease enough around her colleagues to divulge anything at all about her family or her history. But when Hayes continues, it’s benign: “Why’d you get into police work?”

She considers her options. I wanted to help people sounds trite. I thought it sounded interesting—too vague.

At last, surprising herself, she tells the truth.

“The Mod Squad,” says Judy.

“The—” says Hayes, as if he hasn’t heard.

“The Mod Squad,” says Judy. “It was my favorite show.”

Hayes starts laughing. Keeps laughing until he coughs, flicks his cigarette out the window. “I’ll be damned,” he says. “First time I ever heard that one.”

Judy grins.

“The Mod Squad,” says Hayes, laughing and laughing until at last easy silence descends on the car.

Which is when the radio crackles to life.

•   •   •

John Paul McLellan, in his blue Trans Am, has been spotted and detained. He’s on the side of the thruway, ten miles south.

Denny Hayes glances at her. Glances at his watch. “Six o’clock,” he says. “We’re off. We could go home.”

He looks at her. “Do you want to?”

Judy shakes her head.

Hayes radios back, pops his magnetic light onto the roof, careens over the grassy median, and reverses direction.

•   •   •

When they arrive, the state trooper who pulled him over has John Paul McLellan handcuffed. He’s sitting on the grass near his car. He’s been punched. Several times, from the look of his swollen lips, his black eye.

The trooper fills them in: McLellan is obviously drunk, he says. In fact, that was the first thing he noticed. He would have pulled him over anyway, even without the BOLO. He failed his field sobriety test resoundingly.

“He’s all yours,” says the trooper.

•   •   •

“I’ve been at a restaurant,” says McLellan, from the ground.

Presumably, “restaurant” means bar. The smell of the liquor on his breath is evident from several feet away. As is the smell of marijuana.

Hayes opens the passenger door. Begins a search.

“You can’t do that,” says McLellan. “I haven’t authorized a search.”

“Unfortunately for you,” says Hayes—voice strained and muffled as he bends low into the car—“by virtue of the fact that the scent of an illegal substance is discernible from within your vehicle, I do have the right to search it.”

In quick succession, Hayes finds a roach clip, two crushed cans of Genesee, and what appears to be residue from cocaine on the center console. And he hasn’t even gotten to the trunk.

Based on this evidence, along with McLellan’s clear intoxication, he has placed McLellan under arrest.

Judy, meanwhile, takes his license and registration back to the unmarked car, and radios both over to Ray Brook.

From the driver’s seat, while waiting for the operator to come through, she watches McLellan steadily. He’s sniffing, his mouth and face moving in strange ways. At first she attributes this to the coke; she’s never done it herself, but she saw people in high school do it, boys mainly, other jocks. But as McLellan turns his face upward, toward the sun, she realizes he is crying.

Hayes has moved to the trunk now. He’s opening it.

Hayes’s back is to her. With gloved hands, he’s removing an improbable number of objects from the small trunk, placing each one carefully on the ground. Golf club. Golf club. Duffel bag. Satchel. Book. Shoe. Book. Shoe.

Last, Hayes removes a paper bag.

McLellan isn’t looking up, Judy sees. He’s staring hard at the ground.

The color of the bag, which Hayes is handling carefully, looks strange. Not like most paper bags Judy has seen before.

And then she realizes: the bottom of it is darker than it should be.

Judy, keeping a close eye on McLellan to ensure he’s still sitting, gets out of the car and walks toward Hayes, who’s now squatting on the ground, looking inside the bag. As she approaches, he begins lifting each object out in turn, using two gloved fingers to do so.

Underwear, shorts, a T-shirt. Small, white, blue.

It’s a uniform. Covered, by the looks of it, in blood.