Tyler Harrington sat in Interview Room 2 with his lawyer beside him and his mother's certainty wrapped around him like a coat, and for the first forty minutes, Stein told Mike later, he was almost impressive.
He had a story, and he had been carrying it around long enough to wear it smooth. He called it, without any apparent irony, the borrowed driveways. Friends of his — out-of-state friends, names he was reluctant to give because he wasn't a snitch — sometimes needed a car kept somewhere safe for a few days. A favor economy. Cars came, cars went, nobody asked questions because asking questions wasn't what friends did. Had he chosen the driveways? He had suggested a street or two. His mother's street had good people on it; everybody knew that. A compliment to Maple Court, delivered as an alibi. Had he known a single one of the cars was stolen? The lawyer stirred at that one, like a man feeling weather change. Tyler spread his hands — the hands of a young man who had never been asked to spread them — and said he was a trusting person, and that his trust had been abused.
Stein, who was not the detective asking the questions but watched from the next room with the sound up, said the interesting thing was how calm he was about the parts that were true. Two a.m. deliveries? He shrugged; his friends kept late hours. His own car at a storage facility by the highway? He detailed there sometimes, helping Derek. It was a story built like Derek's titles: washed, plausible, with all the names changed.
Then the asking detective set a laptop on the table and turned it around, the way a dealer lays down a card he's been holding all evening.
The camera record was not dramatic. That was its power. It was timestamped and continuous and mercilessly dull: Maple Court at 2:14 a.m., Tyler's figure — identified by his build, his jacket, his own car idling at the curb with its lights off — guiding a red Porsche backward into Mike Callahan's driveway with one hand raised, marshaling it like an aircraft. Hawthorne Lane, the silver sedan, the dolly with VOSS on the fender. Three other nights, three other driveways, Rosa's corner and Tom's gate each catching their half. And against all of it, stacked in the unglamorous order of an evidence log, the inventory of Bay 14: the plates, among them the plate the Porsche had worn in Mike's driveway; the fob ring, among them a fob cloned from a key Derek had held for exactly one afternoon, under the sign that said DETAILING.
"Your friends," the detective said, in the tone of a man reading a weather report, "appear to keep a warehouse."
The lawyer asked for a recess. In the hallway, Stein said, you could watch entitlement do arithmetic.
Stein had watched it the way she watched everything, without leaning. "The thing about entitled," she told Mike, "is that it isn't an act. He genuinely believes the world is a house he grew up in, and the rest of us are guests who've overstayed. Cameras are rude to people like that. Cameras insist the house belongs to everybody." Mike thought about the Porsche sitting in his driveway as if it owned the concrete, and decided Stein had found the size of the thing. Tyler came back into the room a smaller edition of himself, and began — through his lawyer, in the careful grammar of people negotiating with consequences — to remember things in a different order. Diane Harrington, meanwhile, had been busy in a different direction: by the end of that day, Tyler no longer had only his mother's lawyer. He had Leonard Brandt of Brandt & Hale, downtown, a man whose name was on a building and whose hourly rate was a number people repeated to each other for entertainment. Brandt's first statement to the press used the words overreach, hysteria, and witch hunt in a single sentence, which Stein read aloud to Mike over the phone with the flat appreciation of a woman reviewing a competitor's work.
"Does it matter?" Mike asked. "The fancy lawyer?"
"It matters to the invoice," Stein said. "The footage doesn't charge by the hour, Mike. It just sits there being true. Let the Brandts of the world bill somebody for arguing with it."
Mike repeated that line to Sarah at the kitchen table that night, and Sarah, who had been quiet through the whole long season of quiet, laughed for the first time in weeks in a way that reached all the way to her shoulders. Outside, Maple Court was doing its ordinary evening — porch lights, a dog being walked, Tom's newspaper finished at last — and for one evening it was possible to believe the whole business might soon be paperwork in a courthouse, where it belonged, instead of a weight their street carried for other people's sons.
Chapter 20: The Charges