He demanded her name, and she gave it, all of it, clearly, the way she gave it to clerks and marshals and court reporters. He demanded identification, and Ward, miserable, worked her license out of the pocket of her leathers where she directed him with small movements of her chin, handing it to his sergeant like a man handing over a match in a dry field. Kessler carried it back to the cruiser and ran it through the state database, and the database did what databases of its kind do with the names of federal judges, which is to say it showed nothing unusual at all. No flag. No notation. No helpful line announcing that the woman standing handcuffed by the cones presided two counties of the law away. Traffic systems keep the records of traffic. The woman's life in the law lived in other rooms, behind other doors, and the screen in the cruiser had no key to any of them.
Kessler came back with the license between two fingers, holding it the way men hold a card they have decided is worthless.
"Nothing on her," he announced, to Ward, to the cones, to the morning. "Nothing unusual. A clean license and a big story."
"A clean license," Amara said, "attached to a clean vehicle identification number, a matching registration, and active insurance. You have now confirmed everything about me that your systems can confirm, Sergeant, and none of it has helped you, because the one thing you actually need is not in your cruiser. It is in a telephone."
"Meaning what."
"Meaning call the clerk's office of the United States District Court. The number is public. Ask the clerk who is presiding over the checkpoint litigation at eleven this morning. Ask her to describe the judge. It will take two minutes, and one of them will be spent on hold, so you will still have time to be wrong about everything else before lunch."
Ward saw the offer for what it was, and he thought she must have known, even as she made it, that it was a door her sergeant would never walk through. Because to make that call was to admit that the call was necessary. To make that call was to say out loud, into a telephone, with a federal clerk listening, that Sergeant Ray Kessler was standing on a highway holding a handcuffed woman who claimed to be a judge, and that he, Kessler, was not sure. Certainty was the entire currency of the kingdom. A king does not telephone the capital to ask whether he has just arrested its judge.
"Nobody is calling anybody."
Kessler said it flatly, and handed the license back to Ward to return, and gave the woman his best roadside finality, the voice that ended arguments with truck drivers and grandmothers and men in work boots who knew their rights in the abstract and folded anyway.
"You are under arrest for obstruction. You will be transported, you will be booked, and you can tell your story to everybody down the line. Somebody at the jail will be very impressed."
"Sergeant," she said, "every person down that line is going to ask you why you did not make one telephone call when the woman in your custody told you exactly who she was and exactly how to confirm it. I suggest you prepare a better answer than this one."
Above the highway the morning was spending itself. Ward did not need a watch to know what the time was doing. The hearing she had named, eleven o'clock, had been a distant administrative fact when Kessler pointed at the red motorcycle. It was not distant anymore. It was coming down the road toward all of them at the speed of a clock, and the woman in the cuffs stood watching her sergeant refuse to move, as patient as a judge, which, Ward was beginning to understand with a cold and widening certainty, was precisely what he was looking at.
Chapter Ten
The Third Cruiser
The third cruiser came down the highway the way consequences come, unhurried and entirely unsurprised by anything it found when it arrived.
Ward saw it first, a sheriff's vehicle easing out of the thinned traffic and onto the shoulder behind their own cruisers, gravel sighing under its tires. He felt, foolishly, the way a child feels at the sound of a particular car in a driveway, and he was ashamed of the feeling and grateful for it in the same breath. Kessler squared himself as it stopped. The door opened, and Lieutenant Dana Ruiz got out into the heat with a clipboard under one arm and the unhurried posture of an officer who had been sent to look at a thing and intended to actually look at it.