STAY IN YOUR LANE

They took my badge at 9:40 in the morning. By noon I was a civilian with a legal pad and a clock, parked across the street from a rented lot behind the rec center, watching a smiling man in a windbreaker wash a van with a cartoon on the side.

I want to be clear about something, because it matters to how this ends: I did not go over there. I'm not that story. A washed-out patrol officer with no warrant kicking down a door gets a girl killed and a case thrown out, and I had already lost one child to people who did the dramatic thing instead of the right thing. I sat in my own car, off duty, stripped of my badge, and I did the disciplined thing, which is the hardest thing there is when a clock is running.

I called Daniel. "He's here. The van's here. Danny, if she's alive she's within a few miles of this lot — the radius on all five cases centers here. Tell me you're close."

"I'm at the field office in the city," he said, and I could hear him moving, hear a room organizing behind him. "Naomi, listen to me carefully. I ran your file up the chain the second we hung up. You need to know what happened when I said your name."

"Danny, we don't have time for—"

"The SAC stopped the meeting," he said. "Naomi. There are people in this building who teach your frameworks to new agents. When I said 'Naomi Carter thinks she's found a live abduction and a four-year series,' I did not have to convince anyone of anything. I had to ask them to *slow down.*" His voice caught. "You've been hiding in a parking-ticket job for two years, and the Bureau's been treating your absence like a wound. You're not a washed-out patrol cop. You never were. You're the best profiler this unit ever lost, and we're about to prove it to a town that doesn't know who's been writing its tickets."

I sat in my car, and my eyes stung, and across the street a monster wrung out a chamois cloth.

"We're rolling," Daniel said. "Ninety minutes. Warrant's being drawn on your file — your file, Naomi, your analysis is the affidavit. Do not move until we're there. Can you give me ninety minutes?"

Then Dunham dried his hands, and looked at his watch, and walked toward the van with his keys out, and I knew — the way I know things, the way they'd once put in a textbook — that he was about to go somewhere, and that wherever he went, a girl's ninety minutes might not exist.

"Danny," I said, already turning my key, "I don't think I have ninety minutes."