Henley searched the glove compartment and checked beneath the passenger seat. The owner's manual, current insurance information, and a small emergency flashlight were the only items he found. He paused when he saw the hotel conference badge among Morgan's belongings, its lanyard printed with the title of a civil-rights symposium. He did not read the name closely enough to recognize anything, but the irony of the badge unsettled him.
"What have you got?" Nolan demanded. Henley said there was nothing suspicious in the passenger compartment. Nolan told him to keep looking and opened the front luggage compartment, where Morgan had packed a overnight bag. He pulled it out onto the gravel and unzipped it without asking.
Clothes spilled across the dusty shoulder. A cream blouse, a jacket, running shoes, a toiletries pouch, and a folder of public conference materials landed beside the rear tire. Nolan held up a folded dress with the end of his baton and asked how much it had cost, as though expensive clothing might finally prove his theory. Morgan told him it was none of his business and asked again for a supervisor.
"Everything becomes my business when I'm investigating a crime," he said. He opened the toiletries pouch and poured the contents into the bag, then inspected the seams and the luggage lining. He moved from compartment to compartment, increasingly rough with the objects and increasingly irritated by the lack of results. After several minutes, even Henley stopped pretending that the search had a purpose.
A delivery driver named Aaron Price passed the scene in a white box truck. His dashboard camera had been recording automatically since he left a distribution center two counties earlier, and the footage showed Nolan emptying the bag while Morgan stood beside the car. Aaron was not close enough to hear the words, but he could see the posture of the woman and the movement of the baton. He muttered something to himself, remembered the location, and continued because he had no safe place to pull over immediately.
Behind Aaron, a family in a dark SUV slowed slightly. The mother in the passenger seat raised her phone after noticing the low car and the officers around it, initially recording because she had never seen a McLaren Senna on a Virginia highway. Within seconds, her attention shifted from the automobile to the woman being kept in the heat beside it. She lowered the phone when her husband asked her to watch the traffic, then raised it again as they passed.
Morgan could not know how much footage existed. She knew only about the phone recording she had started earlier and the patrol vehicle's dashboard camera, whose field of view might or might not include her position. She also saw the body camera mounted on Nolan's uniform and noticed that the indicator light was dark. When she asked whether it was recording, he told her to stop trying to tell him how to do his job.