His partner noticed the change immediately — you couldn’t miss it, the way all the bravado had gone out of the man’s shoulders in the space of two seconds.
“What,” the second officer said. “What is it?”
The tall one didn’t answer. He just held the case out, hand trembling slightly, and let his partner read it for himself.
It was Victoria’s service identification. Her photograph. Her rank. And beneath it, the name of the department she worked for — the Directorate of Internal Affairs, the unit whose entire job was investigating complaints of exactly this kind of misconduct by police officers in the field.
She had been on her way home from a work meeting. Driving her own personal car, off duty, in plain clothes. That was the only reason they hadn’t recognized her — there was nothing to recognize. She was just a young woman on a quiet road, until she wasn’t.
