Two hours later, I’m outside Shoffler’s place in Greenbelt, Maryland, waiting for him to show up. The house isn’t what I expected – although I’m not sure what that was. I knew Shoffler worked seventy-hour weeks, that he’d burned through two marriages. I guess I expected a crash pad but the tidy rancher in front of me is neat and homey, with a picket fence and well-kept flowerbeds. There’s even a grapevine wreath on the door.

At first, I sit on the porch, but at dusk a cloud of biting gnats drives me back to my car. I wait, listening to the O’s game on the radio and periodically cranking up the air when it gets too hot.

I’m jolted out of my doze by a deep metallic concussion that seems to take place inside my skull. The sound is actually a rap on my car door, a fact that I realize when I open my eyes to see Shoffler looming next to my window.

He’s not happy to see me. He stands in a predatory, almost threatening stance, half in shadow, illuminated by the sickly green of the streetlight. He looks terrible, irritated but so exhausted that my eyes flick to the dashboard clock to see what time it is: 3:32 A.M.

A film of moisture coats my skin. My mouth is cotton, my lips dry and cracked. My shirt is glued to the leather seat and makes a little sucking noise as I sit up and reach for the door handle. But Shoffler pushes his big hand against the Jeep’s door and scowls at me.

“Go home, Alex.”

“No.”

“Just go home.”

“I need to talk to you.”

He pivots on his heel and moves toward the front door; he’s inside before I can get out of the car. I ring his doorbell, which actually goes ding-dong, at least a dozen times. I can’t believe it. I’ve been sitting in the driveway for six hours. Back in the car, my impulse is to lean on the horn, cause a ruckus, force Shoffler to deal with me. But remembering the look on his face, I decide against it.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Shoffler in the past few weeks, and every minute of it I’ve been attuned to him with the rapt attention of a lover, always on the lookout for telltale signs: Has he heard something? Does he have news? I’ve become adept at reading the clues of body language – vocal inflection, gestures, and facial expressions.

I also know that cops and military types put a lot of stock in respect. If I lean on the horn and get in Shoffler’s face in that public way, I won’t get anywhere. He might even have me arrested. I move my car two blocks away and set the alarm on my cell phone to wake me at six. The detective won’t catch me dozing again.

When he comes out the door at 7:44, he looks surprisingly jaunty for a man who got – at most – four hours of sleep. And then he sees me, as I step out from behind his Crown Vic.

His shoulders drop. He wags his head. “Jesus, Alex.”

I just stand there. The Crown Vic’s door locks snap open.

“Get in,” he says.

“What?”

“Get in.”

It’s already hot outside, the sun a white blur behind the dull haze of sky. The interior of the car is stifling. It stinks, too, of old take-out food and stale cigarette smoke spiked with pine air freshener. I’ve spent enough time with Shoffler now to know this about him: he drinks coffee all day long, he chain smokes when he can, and he eats most of his meals in the car.

He backs out of the driveway, lowers all the windows. I think at first that we’re heading out for coffee, Dunkin’ Donuts or the 7-Eleven, but before long we’re on Route 50, rolling along in a rush of white noise. The detective remains silent next to me. After a few minutes, he fools with the controls and all the windows slide closed, with the exception of his. He punches up the air, and lights a cigarette, inhaling with a long greedy pull. It’s out of habit – not out of deference to me – that he exhales out the window. He’s pissed and the irritation comes off him like a force field.

“Where are we going?”

“I got a meeting,” he says, “on the Hill.”

“But-”

“You wanna talk? This is the time I got. You want to get back to your car sometime before midnight? That’s your problem.”

“Okay.”

I have to resist the reflex to apologize, or at least say something that might lower the tension in the car. It’s better this way, with both of us pissed off. This way there won’t be any bullshit.

We’re on 95 now. Shoffler plunges in and out of dense traffic, his driving style fearless and so aggressive I have to work not to push my feet against the floor. He smokes his cigarette all the way down to the filter, stabs it out in the crowded ashtray, then flips the lid closed.

It’s not actually out, and within a minute a thin fringe of smoke – and the acrid smell of burning filters – seeps out from the seam of the ashtray. After a couple of minutes he opens the ashtray again and dribbles some cold coffee into the smoldering mess. There’s a sizzle as the liquid hits the filters, followed by a new and terrible smell. “Aromatherapy,” Shoffler says. He shoves the ashtray shut and taps his fingers against the exterior of the car. “Look,” he says after a while, “I’m not really pissed at you.”

“You’re not?”

“You know why? Because you’re right.”

He yanks the big car into a momentary gap in the left lane, earning a long complaining beep. He sticks his hand out the window, middle finger raised. “My daughter tells me I lack maturity – that’s how she puts it. I tell her this is maturity for me: I give these jokers the finger now instead of pulling ’ em over.” He rolls his shoulders, pats his breast pocket looking for a cigarette, knocks one out, lights it. “So – Mother Sandling.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s like the Sniper case. Everybody’s saying the sniper is a white loner – white, white, white. White guy in a white van. Now, you may not know this, but as the thing is going down, some of the guys in the District – I’m talking about African American police officers – they don’t think so. They’ve got the idea – from eyewitness testimony, from voice tape – that this guy’s a brother. They also think he’s driving a converted cop car, a blue Crown Vic or a Chevy Caprice – what they call a hooptie. Some of the yo’s are partial to recycled police cars – whether out of a sense of irony or just because these babies do go. But the point is, do the rest of us hear any of this? Why is it that no one, in any of the briefings, says one word about a black guy in a blue sedan who calls himself we?”

I shake my head.

Shoffler stabs his cigarette into the mess of crumpled butts. “Is it because Montgomery County happens to be involved in a lawsuit about racial profiling?”

“You’re kidding.”

Shoffler wags his head. “Now, in the Sandling case – we got a lawsuit there, too, more than one. Jones and I – we did see the parallels, you know. Jones gets on the horn to Corvallis. And what happened? Were they helpful, did they extend every courtesy? No. They more or less told us to get lost.”

“She’s the FBI and they blow her off?”

“They’re polite, they want to accommodate us, but yes they blow her off. Like a fucking hurricane.”

“Why.”

“Li-ti-ga-tion. Here’s the deal: Emma Sandling has some issues with the way her boys’ case was handled. She’s suing the police out there – about the length of time she was detained, about the conduct of the investigation, about the follow-up, about every damn thing. There are suits about misconduct and another one over lifestyle profiling.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re saying that the equal protection clause in the Constitution should cover class and lifestyle issues, the same way it covers race, religion, gender, and ethnicity.”

“It’s a constitutional issue?”

“Yeah. Think-a-that, hunh? Now, the cops out there – they don’t trust Sandling. They still think it’s about covering her ass; they still think she was involved. So why – ask yourself – would Sandling be anxious to talk to anybody connected to law enforcement? The cops thought she did it. Her kids were taken away from her – and it took her months to get them back. The only reason she succeeded was because a sympathetic judge figured that leaving the boys in the library and living in a tent was not really neglect. Given welfare reform and the unemployment rate and the lack of child-care alternatives for Sandling, what’s she supposed to do? Anyway, when Jones called, trying to get Sandling’s phone number, she got nowhere.”