On Holt's chest, the body camera sat in its mount with its small red light blinking, patient as a metronome. It had blinked through the laugh. It had blinked through the question about whether she was the homeowner or the help. It had blinked through every second of the water, all forty five of them, in order, with sound. Holt became aware of it the way a man becomes aware of a tooth he has cracked, all at once and then constantly, and he understood that his own chest had been keeping minutes of the meeting too, and that those minutes, unlike his memory, would never learn to be kind to him.
Sir, he said to Webb. I should tell you. The resident is a federal judge.
Webb looked up from the notebook. I know, he said. Dispatch just told me. He looked at Holt for a long moment, not angry, which was worse. She asked you for your number, Ryan. Of everything on this street, that is the part I keep coming back to. She asked, and you laughed, and you told her.
Chapter Eight
The Laugh Replayed in a Quiet Office
The office on the fourth floor had no windows that opened and one that did not matter, a narrow slab of glass that gave onto the parking structure and a strip of gray Portland sky. Captain Doyle liked the room for reviews because nothing in it suggested comfort. There was a table, four chairs, a monitor on a cart, and a water cooler that gurgled at intervals like something clearing its throat before declining to speak.
Holt sat where he was told to sit. His union representative sat beside him with a legal pad and an expression practiced into neutrality. Across the table, two investigators from Internal Affairs, a woman named Serra and a man named Okafor, arranged their folders into a square so precise it looked like a place setting. Nobody offered coffee. Nobody had offered coffee in this room in living memory, because coffee implied a conversation, and this was not a conversation.
We are going to watch the footage in full, Serra said. Then we will watch portions again. You may speak when the recording is paused. Do you understand.
Yes, Holt said.
She pressed a key. The monitor woke on a wide and slightly fish eyed view of Ashbury Lane in morning light, the cruiser's hood at the bottom of the frame, and Holt watched himself walk up the Greer driveway with Daniel two paces behind, smaller than he felt in his own memory of it. The camera did not know his hip hurt. The camera did not know about the call before, or any of the scaffolding he had built around the morning. The camera knew a lawn, a woman, a hose, a question.
On the screen, Naomi Greer stood among her roses with her watering can set down and her hands empty, and she was asking him something in a voice the camera's microphone rendered thin but perfectly clear.
Officer, I did not catch your name. May I have your badge number, please.
And there it was. The laugh. In the quiet office it did not sound the way it had sounded on the lawn. On the lawn it had been reflex, technique, a tool picked up without looking. In the room, through the monitor's small speaker, it sounded enormous and naked, a laugh with nothing underneath it, and it went on a half second longer than Holt remembered, long enough to become a statement. Serra did not look at him. Okafor did not look at him. The union representative studied his legal pad as if the laugh might be written there in a kinder form.
Four eight two seven, his own voice said cheerfully from the speaker. Write it down if you want, lady. Plenty of people have.
The recording continued. The demand for identification. Homeowner or help. The phone ringing in her apron pocket, unanswered. And then the water, and Serra let the water run its full length without comment, all forty five seconds of it, the hiss of the hose loud in the little room, the judge's silence louder, Daniel motionless at the frame's edge, the roses bowing. When the credential came out and the street went still, Okafor paused the recording at last.
We also have two phone videos from neighbors, he said. One from the porch across the street and one from two doors down. They agree with your camera in every particular. He turned a page. Would you like to tell us anything before we watch the laugh again with the audio isolated.
Isolated, Holt said.
The judge's lawyer asked for it that way. Serra aligned her folder with the table's edge. The department is treating the badge number exchange as a separate exhibit. Apparently she intends to say, and I am quoting her statement here, that you were given every chance to be a professional that morning, beginning with a polite question, and that your answer to courtesy was contempt, recorded. She folded her hands. They will play your laugh in the hearing room, Officer Holt. It plays very clearly. We checked.