The appointment brought him back to a place he had once sworn he would leave. His father, Samuel Hargrove, had worked in an automotive shop in Rocky Mount for thirty-one years, repairing imported cars that their owners seldom learned to maintain and rarely learned to appreciate. Samuel could identify a failing bearing by sound and once rebuilt a transmission after another mechanic declared it scrap. He could not, for most of his life, afford the kind of vehicle he knew better than its owner.
When Lennox was nine, Samuel's pickup had been stopped on Highway 64 after a church picnic. There had been no speeding allegation and no ticket. The deputy had ordered Samuel out, made him kneel in gravel, and kept him there while he questioned him about tools he had borrowed from work. A little boy watched through the windshield as passing drivers slowed to stare at a grown man who had done nothing wrong.
Samuel did not argue on the roadside. He brought his son home, cleaned a small scrape on his palm, and ate supper without explaining why his hands shook. Only after Lennox had put on his pajamas did Samuel sit with him on the back steps. The air smelled of cut grass and a nearby tobacco field.
"Hands where they can see them, son," Samuel said. "Say yes, sir, if you need to. Come home. We can argue about the rest when you're alive to argue."
For years, Lennox had mistaken that advice for surrender. He had been angry with his father for not defending himself, angry with the deputy for humiliating him, and eventually angry with himself for being unable to help. It took adulthood to understand what Samuel had actually done: he had chosen his son's presence in the passenger seat over the satisfaction of confronting a man who held authority he had already shown he could misuse.
Samuel died eight years before the appointment, after a final illness that gave Lennox far too many opportunities to replay the conversations they had postponed. The Bentley he bought afterward was dark green, twelve years old, and considerably less expensive than strangers assumed. He had repaired several of its problems himself using Samuel's old tools. Inside the glove box he kept a photograph of his father in grease-stained coveralls beside a silver luxury sedan that had belonged to somebody else.
"He would have liked the car," Naomi said when Lennox mentioned it during the meeting.
"He would have liked telling me everything that's wrong with it," Lennox answered. "Then he'd have fixed it while explaining why I should have bought a pickup."
Naomi smiled, but only briefly. She slid a black metal case toward him, the kind used to carry confidential records between offices. Its seals bore independent control numbers. A plain label across the top read RESTRICTED TRANSITION INTEGRITY REVIEW.
"The original record review was compiled by a small outside team," she explained. "The office has working copies, but this sealed set is to be transferred into the sheriff's custody at midnight. The commissioners authorized you to hold it in the meantime so it wouldn't sit unsecured in a department we are still reviewing."