Chapter 5: Red and Blue in the Mirror
She saw the lights before she heard anything, and for the first instant they did not belong to her.
Red and blue rose in the rearview mirror far behind the Mercedes, small and rhythmic, painting the drizzle in alternating color. Alicia's eyes went to them the way any driver's do at that hour, with a brief, ordinary calculation: someone, somewhere behind her, was having a worse night. She eased her attention back to the road, expecting the cruiser to close the distance and pass her on its way to an accident, a stranded motorist, some trouble farther up Route 12.
The lights did not pass. They grew, steadied, and settled into her lane at a measured distance, keeping pace.
Keeping pace with her.
Alicia checked her speed before she checked anything else, a sequence as automatic as breath. Cruise control: fifty-five. Speedometer needle: fifty-five, resting on the number as if painted there. She was not drifting, not weaving, not crowding the fog line. The car hummed in its lane, centered, unhurried, lawful in every detail she could name, and still the colors strobed across her mirror and washed the wet road behind her in red, then blue, then red again.
Her hands adjusted on the wheel, ten and two, the way her father had taught her and the way she had taught herself to keep them in any moment that required a clear record. Her shoulders, which had begun to soften toward home, set themselves quietly in order. She also noted, with the part of her mind that never stopped preparing a record, the time, the marker, and the absence of any other traffic on the road in either direction.
All right, she said under her breath, not in fear but in the tone she used when a hearing took an unexpected turn. All right. Let us do this properly.
She reached, without looking down, and cancelled nothing, touched nothing she did not need to touch. The indicator came first: a clean, deliberate signal, held long enough to be unmistakable to anyone watching and to any camera recording. Then the gentle reduction in speed, gradual, nothing that could be described as braking hard. Then the turn of the wheel toward the shoulder, smooth over the rumble strip's warning tremor, until the Mercedes came to rest fully off the travel lane, wheels straight, on the wide gravel-edged shoulder near mile marker twenty-two.
Engine off? No. She had decided long ago, from colleagues who practiced criminal law and from a lifetime of watching how stories got told afterward, what a careful driver does. Transmission in park. Hazard lights on, their amber pulse joining the red and blue washing over the wet shoulder. Interior light on, so that no one approaching would have to guess at shadows. Hands on the wheel, visible, empty, still.
Beside her, under the dark overcoat, Jonathan did not stir. The medication held him in that deep, unreachable place, and she was, in the strange arithmetic of the moment, almost grateful. A sleeping man could not make a sudden movement. A sleeping man could not startle anyone. She would handle this the way she handled everything: with documents ready and sentences complete.
Her license was in the wallet in her bag, on the floor behind her seat, where she would not reach for it until she was asked. Registration and insurance lived in the glove compartment, and she would not open that either, not yet, not with an officer approaching a dark car at 1:14 in the morning. Surprises were for courtrooms, where they belonged to her. On a roadside, she intended to contain none at all.
Through the side mirror she watched the cruiser settle in behind her, angled the way patrol cars angle, its headlights flooding her mirrors until she tilted her chin and let her eyes adjust. A door opened. The dome of light inside the cruiser flared and died. She could see the unit number in a break between headlight glare, a dark seven on pale paint, before the figure blocked it.
The officer came up along the left side of the Mercedes at a measured pace, neither hurried nor hesitant, one hand resting near his belt, a flashlight's beam sweeping the rear panel, the trunk seam, the tinted rear window where it lingered a moment, opaque and giving back nothing. The beam moved forward. It crossed the glass beside her husband's hidden shape without pausing, because tint and darkness and a wool coat make no announcements, and it arrived, finally, at her window.
Alicia lowered it before he had to ask, the glass sliding down into the freezing drizzle, and composed her face into the calm, courteous expression of a woman with nothing to hide and every intention of being heard clearly.