Byron remembered that conversation more often than he spoke about it. Over twenty-six years, he worked organized-crime investigations, security assignments, and public-corruption cases involving the abuse of official authority. He saw public servants who took responsibility for mistakes and others who defended misconduct until documents made the defense impossible. He also learned that corruption rarely survived on one dishonest person's determination alone. Someone else had to approve an expense, ignore a complaint, fail to preserve a recording, or decide that making trouble was more dangerous than staying quiet.
Three weeks before the drive, the President had announced Byron as the nominee to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Senate confirmed him after the required proceedings, and he was preparing to take the oath in Washington. News reports had used formal photographs, suits, podiums, and the careful language reserved for national appointments. On the interstate, however, he wore a plain navy polo, light khaki pants, and comfortable shoes, with a jazz playlist moving from one slow trumpet solo to the next.
He was not seeking an encounter with police. He was not conducting an undercover operation, and he did not imagine the trip as a test. He wanted several hours in an ordinary vehicle on an ordinary road before the obligations of his new office made even an unremarkable afternoon feel organized around staff briefings. At breakfast Sharon had touched his hand and told him to call when he reached Washington. He promised he would.
At 2:14 that afternoon, with the outside temperature rising toward ninety-three degrees, the Tahoe passed a cruiser parked in the median. Its speedometer read a shade above the posted seventy-mile-per-hour limit. Hollister, who had been watching northbound traffic with a radar unit resting beside him, saw a large dark vehicle, federal-style plates, and a Black man driving alone. The sergeant sat up straighter, smiled to himself, and pulled into traffic.
Hollister liked to describe his roadside work as intuition. He never explained why the intuition so often selected the same kinds of drivers. To Gallagher, who sat in the passenger seat that afternoon reviewing a stack of warning forms, Hollister said, "Watch this one. Bet you lunch he has a story before we even reach the window." Gallagher glanced up just long enough to see the Tahoe pull over with its signal flashing and its tires stopping well clear of the traffic lane.
The deputy had been assigned to Hollister's unit fourteen months earlier. He was twenty-nine, married to a school librarian named Natalie, and the father of a daughter who had recently learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels. Gallagher came from a family that respected police work, and he had joined the department believing there would be a clear distinction between enforcing laws and using authority to intimidate people. The distinction had been visible during his academy training. On the interstate, working for Hollister, it had grown harder to preserve.