Chapter 17: The Arrest of a Chief
I noticed Agent Denise Hart on the first day of the hearing because she was the only person in the gallery not watching the witness. She was watching the chief. She sat in the back row for two days, forty-seven years old, Montana DOJ, with a legal pad on her knee that she never once wrote on. Some people take notes. Some people are the note.
After the hearing, things moved at the speed of the State of Montana, which is to say: nothing, nothing, nothing โ and then everything in one morning. Kate explained it to me over the phone that week. A suppression hearing doesn't arrest anybody. It takes the temperature of a room and files the reading where people with seals on their doors can find it. The Department of Justice read it. The county attorney read it. Somewhere in Helena, a file with my name on the tab got walked down a hall and set down on a different desk.
On Friday, at 9:40 in the morning, they arrested Dale Dillard at his own station.
Hart served the warrant herself, with two state agents and โ because she is a professional and understands that theater is the enemy of order โ no cameras and no announcement. Dillard read the warrant standing behind his own desk, in his own office, under his own commendations. The charges, as Kate read them to me later off the filing: evidence tampering. Official oppression. Perjury โ for the inventory statement he had signed swearing to the packet, and for the stand, where he had sworn under oath that the dash camera had malfunctioned on its own.
He was asked for his badge and his service weapon. He set them on the desk blotter one at a time, badge first, the way a man sets down cards he can no longer play.
The duty officer walked him to the door of his own interview room โ the one with the camera he had sworn by โ and Hart stopped him, politely, and took him to the other one. The station went on around the arrest the way water goes around a stone: a dispatcher answering a call about a loose dog, a deputy typing a report, everybody very interested in their own paperwork.
Hart offered him the side door, out of courtesy and procedure. Dillard straightened his tie and took the front โ the door he had walked a hundred arrested men through โ and got into an unmarked state car in the thin morning light while a school bus went past and nobody on it knew.
That same morning, in a state evidence room, a clerk pulled the other Dillard file: Frank's, 2006, a box that had slept in storage for nineteen years keeping my father's testimony company. She made it a new tab and wrote a new date on it in fresh marker. Old cases don't die in Montana. They wait in boxes. My father could have told them that. In a manner of speaking, he just had.
I heard about the arrest at the thrift store, from a customer. Mr. Pruitt comes in Tuesdays for the lamps, and that morning he came in holding his phone out in front of him like a tray. "Wren," he said. "They just took your chief out of his own station in handcuffs. It's on the radio."
I said something โ thank you, maybe, or nothing at all โ and went into the back room, between the winter coats and the donation bins, and sat down on a box of donated sweaters. My knees had filed a report of their own, and I needed to be at their height to read it.
He was arrested. Not rumored. Not promised to me by a lawyer at a kitchen table. Arrested, at his desk, by a woman with a legal pad she never wrote on. The cuffs were the station's own, and I thought about that for a while.
I called Kate from the stockroom, sitting on the sweaters, surrounded by other people's cast-off winter clothes, all of them smelling faintly of cedar and somebody else's life. "It's true," she said. "Don't celebrate yet. Paper still has to travel." Then, because she is Kate: "But you can sit down now, Wren. You've been standing up for this a long time."
"I am sitting," I said. "On sweaters."
"Then stay there a minute," she said, and hung up before I could argue.
I stayed until my breathing matched the room again. Through the stockroom door I could hear the register and the bell over the front entrance and Pruitt telling the lamp section the news at full volume, and the world going on at full price. My first thought was not about Dale Dillard. It was this: I have to tell Micah before the radio does. I have to be the one who tells my brother that his sister is not an item on the news anymore.