The conference had been organized around policing, constitutional rights, and the difficult distance between an agency's written rules and what its officers actually did. Morgan had participated in a panel about documenting use-of-force complaints, another about electronic evidence, and a smaller discussion about what happened to witnesses after the news cameras left. She had heard impressive promises from people who would be back in their offices by Monday, and blunt warnings from people who had lived through the consequences of failed oversight. The most useful conversations, as usual, happened over bad coffee in hotel corridors.
Morgan was thirty-eight years old, a lawyer by education and a federal criminal investigator by profession. She had joined federal service eleven years earlier and now worked as a senior special agent with a joint civil-rights task force that supported investigations coordinated with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Her work put her beside prosecutors, forensic analysts, local investigators, and witnesses who often had good reasons not to trust anyone carrying credentials. She knew the distinction between investigating a case and deciding whether to prosecute it, and she respected it because she had seen what happened when people in authority forgot their limits.
Her phone vibrated on the nightstand. A message from Vivian Stokes, the task force's deputy director, asked whether she had received the revised conference notes and whether she planned to drive home that morning. Morgan answered both questions, added that she would stop for food before getting on the highway, and reminded Vivian that she was scheduled to be off duty the following day. Vivian replied with the same two words she used whenever Morgan had been working too hard: Actually rest.
Morgan smiled and put the phone down. She could hear Vivian's dry voice inside those words, and she appreciated the concern even though she had no intention of explaining why she was exhausted. The conference had stirred up memories of investigations that were technically finished but never felt entirely closed, especially those involving people who had lost their jobs or homes while trying to prove what had happened to them. Court orders did not return the years spent waiting, and an official finding did not necessarily make a child stop fearing flashing lights.
She packed the last shirt and closed the suitcase. Before leaving, she called her father, as she did on most days when she traveled. Raymond Owens answered from the backyard of his house in Maryland, where he was attempting to repair a lawn sprinkler and complaining that the replacement fittings were made of plastic. At seventy-one, he could turn any ordinary repair into a lecture on the decline of manufacturing standards.
"You heading out already?" he asked over the noise of running water. Morgan told him she was, and he asked about the conference before she had a chance to ask whether he'd eaten breakfast. He had been a high-school history teacher for thirty-two years, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than hearing that his daughter had challenged somebody's careless assumptions in public. "And you are driving that spaceship again?" he added.