And then thirty-eight years behind a register did something for me that nothing else in my life would have done.
Because when a vendor shorts you, or a kid tries to walk out with something under his jacket, or a man comes in with a bad check, the one thing you learn is that the moment you let him see your face change, you’ve lost the whole thing.
You don’t react. You write it down.
So I picked up my phone off the seat, braced it on the steering wheel, and I took eleven photographs. The house. The number on the door. Both license plates. And her, through the front window, standing at a kitchen counter.
Then I drove home and I did not sleep.
Three Days Later I Sat Across a Desk From a Retired State Investigator and He Said It Was Worse
His name is Ray Vance. Sixty-one, retired out of the state highway patrol’s investigative division, does mostly insurance and family work out of a second-floor office above a dentist in the county seat.
