He stood in his apron with his badge open in one hand. And if there was a victory living anywhere in his face, no camera on that street could find it. When he finally spoke, it was not to her at all. Officer Grady. The chief's voice shifted into the register the departments run on.
You will take the lady's statement complete word for word exactly as she wants it on the record. Then you will take mine and my wife's and my brothers. Officer Bole. You will collect video. Her husband's my nephew's phone and any porch camera on this street whose owner consents.
Then pull the dispatch audio from this afternoon. Both calls. Chain of custody on all of it. Yes, sir. By the book, Anthony said, and looked at Lindsay for the first time since the badge opened, and there was nothing hot in his eyes at all.
Which was somehow far worse. Every page of it, ma'am, you wanted procedure on this lawn. You have my word. You are about to receive all of it. I Lindsay recalculated visibly.
I don't have to stand here for this. I'm going home. Ma'am, actually Grady said with 19 years of gentleness, you do. You called in a violent threat twice. Either that report is true, in which case we investigate it or that report is false.
In which case, And here he let the sentence breathe a little. We investigate it. She looked from Grady's mustache to Boil's notepad to the porches where the retired school teacher was watching her the way teachers watch a lie arriving at its own conclusion to her husband who had begun unbelievably to compose his face into the expression of a bystander to the picnic table of a family she had called a zoo. Standing quietly in the smoke of their uneaten birthday dinner. Not one face on that entire golden street belonged to her.
Boy, the chief said mildly. The gentleman filming his footage is material to his wife's report. See that it's preserved before anything happens to it. Sir Bole turned toward Todd. Hand out.
Almost apologetic. Sir, you said you got every second. And Todd Whitley, mortgage broker, skiboat owner, faithful documentarian of his wife's finest afternoon, looked down at the phone in his hand, the one holding four hours of Lindsay narrating, measuring, rehearsing her tremble, and calling in lies between sips of celery juice, and understood with the slow dawn of a man watching his own house appraise itself. Exactly what he had spent all day filming every second, he repeated faintly. Anthony Freeman closed the badge case, slid it back into the apron pocket next to the meat thermometer and picked his tongs up off the grill shelf.
"Now, if you'll all excuse me," said the chief of police, lifting the lid. "My ribs are burning." They took her statement right there on the sidewalk because she insisted. Grady wrote while Lindsay dictated. Beautiful and blazing. Absolutely certain that the official record was her friend.
The threat. The lung. The fear for her life. The energy. She added flourishes.