Chapter 19: The Statements
By nine the next morning, Saturday had turned bright and indifferent outside the windows of a conference room that did not belong, quite, to anyone. The review had been convened jointly, federal and state, in a borrowed suite at the station's administrative wing, with a recording table, three flags of jurisdiction represented by the people seated around it, and a professional-standards investigator taking the lead so that no one in the room was investigating their own house alone.
Jada arrived with Jayla, both in fresh clothes brought from their hotel, both with box braids redone, both rested in the limited way that four hours of sleep and a long shower allows. Jada's right wrist wore a soft brace she did not need and would not have accepted the night before. Now she accepted it because a physician had examined both sisters at eight, photographed the bruising again in daylight, measured swelling, tested grip, and written findings in language that would hold up anywhere.
They had been offered counsel and had spoken to counsel. They had been offered the chance to defer and had declined. What they accepted, clearly and on the record before the first question, were the terms: they appeared as witnesses to events, not as investigators of them. Their own bureau would run its parallel process elsewhere, with other hands. Nothing they said would be shaped by a case they were building, because they were building none. The distinction mattered to both of them more than anyone else in the room seemed to expect.
Jayla went first, by her own choice. She stated her name, her assignment to financial crimes and civil-rights work, and her understanding that she could stop at any time. Then she walked the room through the Copper Lantern hour by hour, in the order events had occurred, without adjectives doing the work that facts should do. Two drinks ordered, one finished. A pool table dispute that was not theirs. Three off-duty officers, loud, drinking, inserting themselves. Comments about the sisters, about their hair, about who belonged in which part of a bar. A request, politely made, to be left alone. Laughter. A hand on a shoulder that had not been invited.
The investigator asked about the charge. Jayla said there had been no disorder until the officers manufactured an audience for one. She said neither sister had raised her voice before the cuffs, neither had refused a lawful order because no lawful order had been given, only a slurred instruction to step outside and a badge shown like a trump card. She described her credential case slipping from her jacket as she was turned, opening on the floor, the gold visible. She described a boot moving it aside, across dirty boards, as if it were litter.
Jada's statement, given after a break, in a separate session with Jayla out of the room, matched her sister's in structure and differed only where two people honestly differ, in angles and in which words lodge. She spoke about public corruption for a living, she said at one point, and about how it rarely announced itself grandly. More often it looked like small permissions men gave each other in public, each one certain the room would agree to forget. She described complaining about the cuffs three times. She described Pryce carrying her purse by the strap and never once asking whose it was. She described Boudreaux's hand, palm up, waiting.
Investigators asked about alcohol, and both sisters, separately, described smell, volume, gait, and the repeated ordering of whiskey, and both were careful to say what they could not prove, that they had not counted drinks and would not invent a number. They were asked about their own drinking, and answered precisely. They were asked whether they had identified themselves as federal agents before the arrest, and both said yes, plainly, more than once, and that the information had been received as a joke, then as an insult, then as a challenge.
No one in the room promised an outcome. That, too, went on the record. The three officers had been placed on administrative leave, their statements compelled separately under the rules that governed such things, their own accounts not shared with the sisters. The bar's recordings had been requested and, the investigator said, already secured by another team, which neither sister had directed.
Each sister was given a copy of the recording index, a receipt for her property, and the name of a victim advocate, formalities offered without hurry and accepted with the same care.
When the sessions ended, past noon, Jada signed her statement page by page, initialing corrections that were only ever about spelling. Jayla did the same in the next room.
Outside, Jayla slipped her sunglasses on against the white Charleston light. "We sound alike on paper," she said.
"We would," Jada said, flexing her braced wrist. "We were both there. That is rather the point of a true story."