"The spaceship has a name, Dad. It's a McLaren." He said that if the automobile cost as much as a house, it ought to be able to make its own coffee and find its own parking space. Morgan laughed, then listened while he reminded her about highway construction south of Richmond. Before hanging up, he repeated something he had told her since she first learned to drive: "Get home safely. Don't mistake somebody else's urgency for yours."
When Morgan was sixteen, Raymond had given her a different lesson behind the wheel of an aging Honda Accord. He had insisted that she practice responding to a traffic stop even when she had committed no violation, because he knew from experience that being correct was not always enough to make an encounter safe. He had rehearsed where she should place her hands, how she should announce a movement, and how to keep her anger from becoming an excuse for someone else's aggression. Morgan remembered feeling insulted that the lesson was necessary and frightened that her father was so serious about it.
In law school at Howard University, she had learned the constitutional principles behind those conversations. In federal service, she had watched video of people who had done everything her father taught and still been hurt. She had never told Raymond that his instructions sometimes came back to her while she interviewed victims, like a second voice quietly answering the one coming through the recording. He did not need that particular burden in his old age.
The McLaren waited in the hotel parking area beneath a thin layer of morning dust. It was a matte- Senna, all low angles, enormous air channels, and purposeful carbon fiber, looking as though it had been designed by people who had never once considered a grocery run. Morgan had purchased it eighteen months earlier after years of admiring the model from a distance, and she had been embarrassed by how happy the delivery day made her. The car was extravagant, impractical, and entirely hers.
People routinely assumed a federal employee could not legally afford such a machine, and on that narrow arithmetic they were not wrong to ask questions. The answer was simply less exciting than the rumors: her mother had inherited a minority stake in a family-owned industrial supply company, and the eventual sale of that business had left Morgan with substantial investments long before her federal career began. She had disclosed her financial interests through the required ethics process, taken professional advice about the purchase, and paid for the car without a loan. It represented a lifetime of family sacrifices and unusually good fortune, not a secret account or an unexplained government salary.
Her mother Elaine had died when Morgan was twenty-nine, after an illness that gave the family time for conversations but not enough time to make peace with the future. Elaine had been an engineer who could spot a faulty assumption in a room of senior executives and ask one short question that left everybody checking their figures. Morgan sometimes heard her mother's voice when a witness described being told to ignore what they had seen. Elaine's favorite phrase was that facts did not become disrespectful merely because they contradicted somebody important.