The rain had just stopped, leaving Interstate 84 looking like a river of black glass. At two in the morning, the highway was entirely abandoned, surrounded by thick, impenetrable walls of pine trees that swallowed the ambient light. Maya gripped the leather steering wheel of her dark sedan, her knuckles slightly white. She was a thirty-two-year-old investigative journalist, a brilliant African American woman with dark, loose curls and a mind that processed details with terrifying speed. She wore a crisp white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and dark blue skinny jeans.
She had been driving for three hours, heading back from the state capital with a decrypted flash drive sitting securely in her glovebox. The drive contained exactly what she had spent six months hunting for: the unredacted internal affairs records of the county sheriff's department.
Suddenly, the suffocating darkness in her rearview mirror was violently shattered.
The aggressive, strobing flashes of red and blue police sirens pierced the night, reflecting blindingly off the wet asphalt and flooding the cabin of her car. Maya didn’t panic. She didn’t speed up. With practiced, deliberate calmness, she activated her turn signal and guided her sedan onto the muddy, gravel-strewn shoulder of the highway. She shifted the car into park, turned off the engine, and rolled down her window. The cold, damp night air rushed in. She knew exactly who was patrolling this stretch of the county, and she knew exactly why he had pulled her over.