Ren held his gaze steadily. "I'd rather not get into it," she said. "It's not relevant to what happened today. What's relevant is that a man twice my size grabbed a pregnant woman hard enough to nearly knock her down, knocked an old man's cane out from under him, and then tried to shove me on a public sidewalk. I stopped him.
I let him go the second he stopped being a threat. That's the whole of it. Doyle studied her a moment longer, and something in him, some old instinct, sharpened by 6 years of service and 26 more of policing, told him he was looking at only the visible top of something much larger underneath. He didn't push further. Not yet.
Procedure required him to hold her for processing regardless, pending statements from the other witnesses, pending a decision from the district attorney's office on whether Walter Colton's complaint would even go anywhere once those statements came in. I'm going to need to hold you here a while longer, he said. Not because I think you're lying to me, because I've got a councilman's son with a complaint filed, and until I've got enough statements to close this the right way, my hands are somewhat tied. I understand, Ren said. And she did more than he probably realized.
She had spent years operating inside chains of command that made far less sense than this one, following procedures she didn't always agree with, because the alternative, a world with no procedures at all, was so much worse. For what it's worth, Doyle added, "I've been chief here 11 years. I've read a lot of statements from a lot of people trying to make themselves sound braver than they were." "Yours didn't sound like that." It sounded like somebody who's had to file a report before, an official one, the kind with a chain of command attached to it.
Ren said nothing, but she held his gaze a beat longer than necessary, and something passed between them, unspoken. The recognition of two people who had learned in different uniforms the same hard lessons about restraint and consequence. Doyle stood, gathering his folder. At the door, he paused. One more thing, he said.
The witness statements coming in this afternoon don't match what Walter Colton told me an hour ago. Not even close. Ren said nothing, but something in her shoulders eased just slightly. The smallest fraction of tension releasing. Sit tight, Doyle said.
I don't think you'll be here as long as you're expecting. She was there longer than he'd hoped, as it turned out, because Walter Colton, upon hearing that the pharmacy footage and the witness statements weren't cooperating with his version of events, had made three separate phone calls that afternoon, each one designed to slow the process down rather than speed it toward the truth. Ren sat alone in the small gray room for two more hours, the light outside the window sliding from afternoon gold into evening blue. She thought about Eleanor alone in her room at Riverside, wondering where her granddaughter was, why the Tuesday visit hadn't happened. She thought about Nora home now, presumably one hand on her stomach.