“There’s the big hero,” the older Joan said. “And gracing our little basement office.”

She got up and gave me a hug, and the younger Joan followed after.

“How’s our girl doing?” the younger Joan said, referring to Remy. Every woman in the building loved my partner.

“She’s recovering nicely,” I said. “I think she’s gotta take a few months off of running, but she’s in a boot as of this morning. I’ll tell her you were asking.”

“What do you need, hon?” the older Joan asked. “You on your own while Rem’s off?”

“I am,” I said, grabbing a black rolling office chair and sitting down. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here on the weekend.”

“You’re in luck. We back up all the servers, once a quarter on a Saturday. What can we help with?”

“Well, I got a weird question for y’all.” I hesitated. “You know that unpopular license plate scanner program we had going last year?”

“You mean the original reason we have jobs?” Older Joan smiled.

Under the old chief, the city had invested in technology that installed scanners mounted to four police cruisers. The cops who drove those black and whites went about their day like normal, but while they worked, three high-def cameras mounted on their roof took photographs of every parked car they passed: the vehicle, their passengers, and the plates. The system was even smart enough to package the pictures together so you had a location on the car, its profile shot, and the license plate, all in one folder.

The original plan was that if a car’s plate came across as stolen, an officer was alerted and a squad car dispatched into action. Through tickets and impounds, the program would pay for itself in three years.

“We’re not still running that, are we?” I asked.

“The program got shut down,” the older Joan said. “I thought you knew that, P.T.”

“No, that’s what I thought,” I said. “I remember some privacy group found out how much personal information the system was compiling.”

This included pictures of citizens, and not just the guilty. The cameras were basically documenting a day in the life of our city. Seventy-five hundred photos every day.

“But the database still exists, right?” I asked. “I mean—it was running for over a year. You must have two or three million photographs burning a hole in your server.”

“Why do you ask?” Younger Joan said.

“I’ve got a person of interest who’s proving hard to find.”

“You know his name?” she asked. “We can put a BOLO out on him.”

“Well,” I said. “This is a unique case. I’ve got reasons I don’t want the search to be on official channels.”

For most cops, this might cause a room to go quiet. When you imply that you couldn’t trust other cops with information.

But after the school shooting and the incident in Atlanta, I was above reproach.

“What time period are we talking?” Younger Joan asked.

“Well, there’s an initial incident back in December of ’17,” I said, holding up a close-up of the Camaro with the license plate showing. “But I’ll take any locations you have on this car.”