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.
Judy looks at McLellan. His head is still lowered.
She looks at Denny Hayes, who’s saying something Judy can’t hear. Shit. Shit.
His face looks drained of color. For all his bravado, he seems unprepared for this. He’s a father, Judy remembers: all other things aside, he has his own children.
• • •
All three of them are silent on the ride to the station, until Denny talks.
“Did you kill her?” he says, and the noise of the question is like a gun going off. Judy can hear the air moving around the car in its wake.
She glances at McLellan in the rearview. He’s looking out the window, his expression inscrutable. For a time, she thinks he won’t speak at all—until he does.
“I invoke my right against self-incrimination,” he says.
Spoken, she thinks, like the son of a lawyer.
• • •
