Chapter 15: The Search
Weldon opened the driver's door like a man opening a present he had already described to the room. "Watch and learn," he said, to Tran or to Blake or to the cameras, and he leaned into the Mercedes with his flashlight cutting ahead of his hands.
Alicia watched from where Blake had stationed her, three paces back from her own car, arms folded against the cold, Tran standing nearer to her than to either man. The rain had thinned to a needling drizzle again. The interior light of the Mercedes came on and stayed on, and it lit Weldon's face from below in slices as he worked.
He started loud, narrating his own probable cause as he went, the way men narrate when they expect an ending to applaud them. "Glove box first, since that's where she kept pointing us." He pulled it open and emptied it with both hands onto the driver's seat: registration folder, insurance cards, a folded map, a tire gauge, a packet of tissues, a phone charger coiled neat as a bracelet. He shook the folder. He opened every flap of it. He held the tissue packet up and squeezed it, and set it down with the first small frown of the search.
"Nothing in the glove box," Tran said quietly, because her camera was running and someone, she seemed to have decided, should be keeping an honest record in parallel.
"I'm aware, Officer," Weldon said. "Center console." The console yielded a pair of sunglasses, a toll transponder, a pen, a tin of mints he opened and sniffed with theatrical care before snapping it shut. "Door pockets." A folded umbrella, a microfiber cloth, an unopened bottle of water. "Under the seats." His flashlight swept the footwells and came back with dust and a paper parking receipt, which he read as if it might confess, front and back, before dropping it on the seat with the rest.
The pile on the driver's seat was becoming an exhibit of an ordinary life, and nothing else. Alicia could see his shoulders change as he moved to the back seat, performance draining into something harder. He pulled the rear cushions forward. He ran his hand into the seams. He opened the fold-down armrest, checked the trunk release, popped the trunk from inside and went around to the back of the car with his light held high, and Alicia heard the trunk lid rise and the soft, hollow sound of a man finding a spare tire, a jack, an emergency kit still sealed in its plastic, and a gym bag he unzipped twice.
"Trunk's clear," Tran said, into her own light, into her own record.
"Did I ask for a play-by-play?" Weldon snapped, coming back around the car faster than he had gone. His uniform was dark with rain at the shoulders now and his jaw was working. "There's something in this car. I know what I smelled at that window. Eleven years, I know that smell."
"And I know what is in my car," Alicia said, evenly, from her three paces, "because it is my car, and I stated it for the cameras before you opened it. There is nothing. There was never anything. The smell was your probable cause, Officer, and it has now searched my glove box, my console, my seats, and my trunk, and found tissues and a tire gauge."
"Don't," Blake said, a warning without a clear target.
"She doesn't get to do a victory lap," Weldon said. "We're not done. We haven't done the front properly. Under the hood, and the passenger side, I haven't done the passenger side yet."
Something cold that had nothing to do with the weather moved through Alicia then, and she mastered it the way she had mastered everything else that night, by standing very still and keeping her face arranged. On the far side of the car, behind the passenger glass, behind the tint so dark that four separate lights had so far shown these officers nothing but weather, the front passenger seat lay reclined beneath a dark wool overcoat. It had not moved. Nothing about it had moved all night, not for the flashlight strikes, the pat-down, or the spilling of her things onto a wet seat. It was only a shape, long and still, the shape any folded coat might make, if a coat were six feet three inches of stillness and patience and held breath.
"You've done the cabin," Tran said, and there was a new thin wire of something in her voice. "The driver's side, the back, the trunk—"
"I said the passenger side." Weldon's light came up and swung across the hood, and he walked around the front of the Mercedes with the beam leading him, past the headlight glare, toward the passenger door, where his hand, Alicia saw, was already rising toward the handle. "Let's see what she's got riding shotgun that's worth all this talking."