He described fourteen months inside Hollister's interdiction unit. In his first week, the sergeant had taken him to the usual median pullout and pointed at the stream of interstate traffic. He explained that out-of-state plates were worth examining, that certain kinds of vehicles were usually carrying something profitable, and that a young officer who wanted a future in the department should learn to notice opportunities other deputies missed. Gallagher initially believed these remarks referred to ordinary investigative judgment. The racial emphasis became impossible to ignore once Hollister explained which drivers he wanted searched first.
"He called it the combination," Gallagher said. "Out-of-state plates and dark skin. If the car looked expensive, he said the driver must have money from something illegal. If it looked cheap, he said the driver must be desperate enough to be carrying cash for somebody else. There was no kind of car that made the driver innocent once he'd decided he wanted to stop it."
Porter asked whether those instructions were written. Gallagher shook his head. Hollister never wrote them on the forms or repeated them near supervisors he did not trust. He shared them in the cruiser or beside the open trunk of a stopped vehicle, sometimes laughing as though the instructions were a joke. The younger deputy had learned that pretending to laugh was the easiest way to avoid another lecture about being too sensitive for the job.
There were practical rituals, too. Hollister liked to begin with a minor traffic violation, then ask an expanding series of questions about employment, destination, relatives, and the amount of cash a driver might be carrying. He treated nervousness as evidence of guilt and confidence as evidence of arrogance. A refusal to consent to a search became proof that the person had something to hide. Every answer was turned in the same direction, as though the encounter had only one possible ending.
Gallagher said Hollister kept a manila folder in the cruiser with a handwritten tally of seizures. The numbers had little to do with arrests or convictions. On some days, the sergeant added the amount taken and drew a line beneath it. At the end of the month, he compared totals and complained when they were lower than the month before.
"He called it a scoreboard," Gallagher said. "One time I asked what it meant when the district attorney declined a case. He said it meant they still got the money if the driver didn't fight hard enough to get it back."
Porter asked where the folder was. Gallagher said it might be in the cruiser's locked storage compartment or among the sergeant's seized-property forms. The investigators checked the authorized vehicle inventory that afternoon and found it beneath a stack of warning citations. Its cover was dirty and unremarkable. Inside, figures appeared month by month, sometimes accompanied by abbreviations that matched dates and amounts in the official records.