Chapter 3

Sergeant Dean Pruitt came off the bay step with a clipboard already in his hand, and he did not look at Emmett at all.

Forty-four years old, flat-top, square face, a man who stood like the air around him belonged to him. He had signed Colton Reedy's field-training reports for eight months.

"Sheriff. I heard it on the radio. I'll take it from here."

"No," Mabry said. "You'll stand there."

Emmett had already taken his cap off. He leaned in toward the glass with his hands behind his back, the way he'd leaned into ten thousand windshields, and read it out loud, slow, like a man reading a will.

"Serial four-oh-one-one-eight-eight. Inspector license four-one, eleven-eight-seven. Date of inspection, March third. Signature, E. Sorrell."

He stepped back and put his cap on.

"That's my number," he said. "I turned that number in."

Reedy laughed. It came out high and short and wrong. "It's a sticker."

"It's dated March third," Emmett said. "I mailed my license and my last book back to Jefferson City on November second, the year before last. So either I signed this three months after I was allowed to, or somebody has been writing my name on state property for a while now."

Behind them, shift change had started to drift in - Tanya Voss pulling her jacket on, Owen Beck with a coffee, two more by the bay door, not talking.

"Who signed it, Emmett?" Mabry said.

"I don't know the hand. Big loops. Left-handed, or a man who wants you to think so." Emmett shook his head. "But I know what it's doing on this glass. Junior Bell does the county's inspections now. Junior Bell's number belongs on this cruiser. Mine hasn't been legal for eighteen months."

Pruitt stepped in then, clipboard against his chest, voice pitched low and reasonable.

"Sheriff, this is a personnel matter. Let's take it inside."

Then he turned to Reedy and asked it quiet, almost under his breath.

"Which book?"

The lot was cold and still, and the word landed like a dropped tool.

"What book, Sergeant?" Emmett said.

Pruitt's jaw moved once. "Go home, Mr. Sorrell. We'll fix your lamp and this stays a conversation."

"I'll go home at six," Emmett said. "When the whole shift is standing here. And then I'm going to say my own name out loud in front of every one of them, and you can decide which one of us has to explain it."