"Mr. Brooks," she said, "I am going to photograph your son's arm, with your permission and his. The photographs go into the incident file tonight. They are not optional and they are not informal. Do I have your permission?"
"You do," Marcus said. "Caleb?"
Caleb looked at the camera in her hand the way children look at instruments, with suspicion of its manners. "Will it hurt?" he asked.
"It will not touch you," Foster said. "Nothing else touches you today without your father and me agreeing first. That is a promise with my name on it." She crouched down to his height without making a ceremony of it, and she held a small gray scale card beside his arm the way medics do, and the camera spoke its small mechanical word several times. The marks were already darkening at the edges, five of them, in the unmistakable arrangement of a grip, red prints on the inside of a thin arm. Finger shaped. The phrase would appear in her report exactly so, because it was exact, and because exactness was the only apology she was authorized to make that day.
"Body camera footage from both units is to be preserved in full," she said, standing, to the street in general and to Reeves in particular. "No deletion, no gap, no summary in place of the record. The dispatch audio likewise. I will log the preservation myself before end of shift."
Then she turned to Reeves, and her voice changed by the one degree that separates a colleague from a finding.
"Officer Reeves. You will return to the station now. You will write your report there, and you will remain available pending review of this incident. You will have no further contact with this family in any capacity. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Then go."
He went. He walked the length of the driveway past the scattered groceries that nobody had yet picked up, past the hoop and the bicycle and the gray columns, and he got into the cruiser that had blocked the mouth of this family's home, and he backed out slowly into the street he had come down so certainly, not an hour before. Caleb watched the car until it turned the corner. Only then did his shoulders come all the way down, like a tent when the pole is pulled.
Foster took a clean page, and then she did the thing Marcus would remember longest, longer than the radio, longer even than the card. She wrote for him. In the notebook of a man who wrote things down for a living, on the first blank page she could find, she set out in her leaning hand everything a citizen is supposed to be given and so often has to beg for. Her full name. Her badge number. The incident number for the afternoon, digit by digit. The telephone number for internal affairs, and the route a complaint travels once it is filed, and the office where a copy of the report could be requested, and her own instruction to call her directly if any part of it failed to arrive.
"Nothing about today gets lost," she said, tearing nothing out, handing the notebook back whole. "If it is not in the file, it did not happen the way I run a file. And it will be in the file, Mr. Brooks. All of it. The stop, the door, the hand, the radio, the caller. All of it in the order it occurred."
"Thank you," Marcus said. He read the page twice, the investigator in him surfacing through the father like a swimmer. "You understand I will use every line of this."
"I wrote it so that you could," Foster said.
Caleb had been quiet a long time, holding the rescued cereal box against his chest like a shield he had decided to keep. Now he spoke, to the sergeant, in the voice of a boy asking the only question that had been underneath all the others since the cruiser first blocked his street.
"Am I in trouble?" he asked. "For any of it?"
Foster looked at him with the full attention she had given every object on the driveway, as though he were the record itself.
"No," she said. "You are the one person here who is not."
And Marcus wrote that down too, on the page beneath her numbers, in handwriting that was not steady, because some sentences a father needs to be able to find again.
Chapter Sixteen
Urgent Care
The urgent care clinic sat between a pharmacy and a closed bakery on the road out of the neighborhood, and its waiting room smelled of cleaner and old magazines. Marcus filled out the forms on a clipboard while Caleb sat beside him swinging his feet, which did not reach the floor. In the space for the reason for the visit, Marcus wrote for a moment with the pen hovering. Then he wrote: arm grabbed by police officer. Bruising. He wrote it plainly, the way he wrote facts into reports at his own job, because plain facts were the only kind that held their shape.