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 deaclass="underline" 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.”
“Sandling wouldn’t talk.”
“Right. Sandling won’t talk, the cops won’t talk, the lawyers won’t talk. We asked.”
“Did she know about Kevin and Sean?”
Shoffler swings his big head in my direction and just looks at me. “What do you think? You think she coulda missed that story? Maybe if she lived on Mars. No, the thing is your boys’ kidnapping brought the whole thing back. It terrified her.”
“How do you know?”
“We had a conference calclass="underline" me, Jones, Sandling, and her lawyers. The lawyers are a big help, as you can imagine – keep telling her she doesn’t have to talk to us, doesn’t have to answer this question or that. But we really whacked away at this woman; I mean, we laid on the guilt as thick as we could. Here were two boys in peril, her boys might have information helpful in the investigation, how could she as a mother… blah, blah, blah.”
“And?”
“Nothing. We did not get to first base. Wherever she’s living now, no one knows who she is. And she wants to keep it that way… which is understandable. She’s worried about some kind of leak, that her boys’ case will end up all over the news again, they’ll be outed in their new place. Maybe the perp will come back for another round – to which Jones says, ‘not if we catch him.’ But Sandling is not interested; she won’t say boo. The lawyer follows up by warning us not to mention the Sandling case to the media.”
“You’re kidding.”
“He called Jones’s supervisor at the Bureau and my chief in Arundel… just to reinforce the warning.”
I just sit there, in a funk of anger and impotence. I’m pissed at Sandling, her lawyers, the cops, everybody. And what’s worse, I’m sick at heart. I take a few deep breaths, fighting off a sort of interior collapse.
“You okay?” Shoffler says.
I shrug.
“I can do two things for you,” Shoffler says. “First – and I doubt this will do you a hell of a lot of good – I can get you a copy of the sketch. The one they did working with the Sandling kids. Jones got that out of them. I wasn’t supposed to make a copy, but I did. Anyway, it was published in the papers at the time. Anyone asks, that’s where you got it.”