Chapter 3
Cleared
It took nineteen days.
Nobody would say afterward that it had been rushed. That was the thing the department was proudest of. There had been an Internal Review, and a review by the District Attorney's office, and a closed-door meeting of the Use of Force Board, which met in a long beige room on the sixth floor of headquarters with a flag in the corner and a pitcher of water that no one touched. There had been interviews. There had been a map of the alley, with colored pins. There had been a ballistics report forty pages long, and a diagram of the human body, and a timeline broken into seconds.
Tom had not been asked to attend the Board. That was normal. He was asked, on a Tuesday afternoon, to come to the sixth floor and wait in the hall.
He sat on a bench. He wore his dress blues, which Anna had pressed the night before, and which were a little tight at the shoulders. He had lost nine pounds. On the wall opposite hung a row of framed photographs: past chiefs, in sepia, with very large mustaches. At the end of the row was a blank space where the next one would go.
Mike was not there. Mike had been interviewed on the second day, and again on the ninth, and had been told he did not need to come back. He had not returned any calls for a week.
At ten past three the door opened, and Sergeant Ross came out.
He was in uniform. His face was calm and heavy and kind. He walked straight across the hall, sat on the bench beside Tom, and for a moment did not say anything. He took off his hat and set it on his knee.
"It's done," he said.
Tom let out his breath.
"Within policy. Unanimous. Five to nothing." Ross turned the hat a quarter turn on his knee. "The DA's office signed off this morning. No charges. The chief will make a statement at four."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"I mean, thank you. Thank you, Dave."
"I didn't do anything." Ross put a hand on his shoulder, large and warm. "You did it. You told the truth. You never changed a word. That's what they wrote, you know. In the finding. 'Officer Walker's account has been entirely consistent.' They said that twice."
"Good."
"It is good." Ross studied him. "You don't look relieved."
"I am."
"You look like a man who's been told to wait for the other shoe."
"I'm just tired."
"Of course you are." Ross squeezed once and let go. "Go home. Take a few days. The department's going to put you on desk duty for a month, standard, and then we'll talk about the street. Nobody's in any hurry. You've got a wife and a kid and sixteen years. You've got people who love you."
He said it with such warmth that Tom felt his throat tighten.
"Thanks," he said again.
"And Tom."
"Yes?"
"There'll be noise." Ross glanced down the hall. "People outside. Some signs. A lot of people are going to say a lot of things on the television. Don't read it. Don't watch it. Don't let your wife read it, if you can help it. It'll die down in two weeks."
"I know."
"I know you know." He smiled. "I'm just a sergeant. I like to say it twice."
They played him the video that evening, in a small office, just the two of them and John Price.
It was not required. Price had asked for it, as a courtesy, so that Tom would not be surprised when the footage was released. A young technician in a gray hoodie set up a laptop on a desk, said, "I'm really sorry about this, sir," and left.
Tom sat with his hands on his knees.
The picture came up gray and shaking. It was the body-camera on his own chest, which had been knocked loose in the chase and hung crooked on its clip, so that all the footage was tilted at a slant, like a photograph taken from the deck of a ship. There was wet concrete, and the swinging edge of his own sleeve. There was the noise of breathing. It was a rough, rapid, animal sound, and it took him a moment to understand that it was his.
Police! Stop right there!
The picture swung. A bright shape ahead, a gray blur. A fence. The tilting ground rushed up and slowed. His own boots, black and wet, planted far apart on the cement.
Show me your hands!
He was watching the ground.
That was the first thing he saw, and it bothered him in a way he could not name. The camera showed the ground, and the bottom of the fence, and half a leg in a pair of loose dark jeans. It showed a bare foot, small and pale, with the toes turned slightly in. It showed one white sneaker lying on its side. It did not show the boy's hands. It did not show his face. It did not show anything above the belt.
Drop it!
His own voice, enormous. A scraping. A rush.
Drop it!
Two shots.
The picture jerked. For one second it showed the sky, a dull orange, with a wire across it. Then it dropped, and came to rest on the pavement, and the last thing it recorded was a gray sleeve lying across a wet crack. And a sound. In the sound, behind the thunder of the guns, behind the ringing and his own gasping and the crash of Mike's boots, there was a thin small noise that rose and fell.
It was not a word. It was very faint.
"That's the part," said Price, "that Bell's people worked on. The audio lab spent four hours with it. They isolated what they could."
"What did they get?"
"Nothing." Price shrugged. "It's the juvenile's voice. Maybe. It's very low, and it's under your own shouting, and under the gunfire. It's what we call unintelligible."
"Unintelligible."
"They ran it through three filters. They had two different people listen. You can hear that someone is speaking. You can't tell what. It could be a word. It could be a cry. It could be the siren. Honestly, Tom, it could be a lot of things."
"Mike says."
"What does Mike say?"
Tom stopped.
He did not know what he had been going to say. He sat there, with the little gray picture still frozen on the screen, with the sleeve and the crack and the corner of an orange sky. He had a feeling like standing at the top of a flight of stairs in the dark.
"Nothing," he said.
"Mike told the Board he did not hear any words." Price closed the laptop. He did it very gently, as one closes a book. "He told them he was fifteen feet back, with the siren going, and he couldn't make out any speech. That's what he said under oath. I'd leave it there."
"I'm leaving it."
"Good."
"I was just, I was only."
"It's all right." Price patted his arm. "It's a hard thing to see. It's not meant to be easy. You were looking at a threat. The camera isn't a person. It's a lens on a bad angle. It doesn't know what you knew."
The chief gave his statement at four o'clock, on the front steps of headquarters.
Tom watched it from a conference room on the third floor, on a television set hung from the wall. He had been told not to. He had been told by three different people, kindly, that it would be better to go home. But he stood in front of the screen with his arms folded, in his tight blue uniform, and watched a tall gray man in a dark suit walk up to a bank of microphones.
Chief James Hall was fifty-eight, and had been a policeman since before Tom was born. He had a long lined face and a deep, quiet, careful voice. He stood at the lectern with his hands on either side of it, and did not look at any notes.
"On the evening of October fourteenth," he said, "a young man named Samuel Carter lost his life in the city of Harlow. He was sixteen years old. I want to begin by saying that. He was a child, and he had a mother, and his death is a tragedy that no finding of this department can undo."
There were people behind him, a dozen or so, on the steps of the building. A woman in a church hat held up a hand-lettered sign. It said, SAY HIS NAME. A young man in a green jacket was shouting something that the microphones did not pick up.
"The Department has completed a full and thorough review of the circumstances," said Hall. "I want to be clear that this review was independent, and that it was not influenced by any consideration other than the facts. I can tell you that it found that Officer Thomas Walker, a sixteen-year veteran of this force, acted in accordance with the policies of this Department, and with the law."
A rustle. A shout.
"Officer Walker was responding to a report of a possible armed subject. He pursued that subject on foot. At the end of the pursuit, in a poorly lit alley, he believed that he saw the subject reach for a weapon. What the subject had in his hand, in fact, was a can of spray paint. This tragic fact was not known to Officer Walker at the time. He made a split-second decision, under extreme stress, based on what he reasonably perceived to be an imminent threat to his own life."
He paused.
"I want to say this, and I'll say it as a man and not only as a chief. This was not a case of malice. It was not a case of carelessness. It was a case of an honest, brave, experienced officer facing a situation in which he had less than two seconds to decide, and in which, God help us all, he decided wrong in the only way that could be known after the fact."
Decided wrong.
Tom stood in the empty conference room with his arms still folded. He had not expected that. He listened to it again in his head. Decided wrong in the only way that could be known after the fact. He did not know whether the chief had meant it kindly. He did not know whether it was a mistake in the speech.
He thought, they'll cut that line.
"The Department extends its deepest sympathy to the family," said Hall. "We have reached out. We will continue to reach out. And we will continue to do what this community has always asked of us, which is to serve it, to protect it, and to learn."
He turned from the lectern. Reporters were calling out questions. He did not answer them. He walked up the steps and in through the glass doors, and the camera followed him for a moment, and then cut back to a woman in a blue suit on a street corner, who said the words no charges in a bright, concerned voice.
Tom switched it off.
He went back to work on the third of November.
They gave him a desk in Records, in a windowless room at the back of the second floor, beside a woman named Lorraine who was seventy and had been there since the building was put up, and who gave him a cup of tea the first morning without saying a word. He sat at a gray steel desk and filed things. He answered the phone. He looked up old case numbers for lawyers and for insurance companies, and typed them into forms. The work was dull and kind. It felt like being put to bed.
On the third day, at noon, the squad came to find him.
He heard them coming down the hall. A heavy shuffle of boots, and low voices, and somebody laughing, and then Ross's big shape filling the doorway. Behind him were a dozen others, men and women in uniform, some he had known for fifteen years and some he did not know. They were holding paper plates. One of them, a thin young patrolman named Hughes, was holding a cake.
"Surprise," said Ross, mildly.
"What is this?"
"It's nobody's birthday," said Hughes. "We just. We wanted to."
The cake was white, with blue icing. Across the top, in careful letters, somebody had piped, WELCOME BACK TOM. The M had run a little. It looked like it was crying.
He stood up behind his desk. He did not know what to do with his hands. All the faces were turned toward him, and every one of them looked at him with the same expression: a kind of heavy, open tenderness, as if he had been brought home from a war.
"Speech," said somebody.
"Oh, no."
"Come on. Speech."
"I don't," he began. "Thanks. I'm not. I don't know what to say." He laughed. It sounded false to his own ears. "I appreciate it. It's been a hard month."
"It's been a hard month for everybody," said Hughes.
Someone started to clap.
It was one of the women at the back. A slow, steady clap. Then another joined, and another, and in a moment the whole room was clapping, not loudly, in the small hot room with the cake on the desk and the cups of tea. He felt his face go red. He lifted both hands, stop, stop, and nobody stopped. He looked at their faces, at Hughes with his big proud eyes, at an old sergeant who had once taught him to tie a tourniquet, at Ross, who was beaming. Warmth rose in him like a tide. He thought, these are my people. He thought, they're right. He thought, it's over. It's finished. I did what I had to do, and they know it.
He looked past them, down the hall.
Mike was standing at the end of the corridor.
He was in uniform. He had come out of the elevator, apparently, and stopped. He stood very still with his hands at his sides and did not come any closer. He was not clapping. His face was pale and puffy, and his collar was unbuttoned at the throat, and he looked, in that long shadowy hall, like somebody who had come to the wrong party.
Their eyes met.
Mike held it for a second. Then he turned and walked back into the elevator, and the doors slid shut on his shoulder.
The clapping went on.
That night they had a quiet dinner, the three of them, at the kitchen table. Anna made pasta. Emma told a long story about a girl at school who had brought a snake in a shoebox. Pepper sat under the chair and chewed Tom's shoelace.
He ate everything on his plate.
He helped with the dishes. He read the end of a chapter book out loud, in his bad voice for the troll, and Emma said, "Dad, the troll doesn't sound like that," and he said, "What does the troll sound like?" and she gave a long, serious, very accurate impression of an old man gargling with rocks, and they both laughed until Anna called up the stairs that some people had work in the morning.
At ten he walked the cat's litter box out to the bin.
It was a cold night. Clear, with a hard bright moon, and every house on the street lit in its own yellow square. He stood at the curb in his socks, with a plastic bag in one hand, breathing smoke into the dark. He felt, for the first time in nineteen days, entirely at peace.
It's over.
He looked across the street.
There was a streetlight in front of the Ramirez house, a tall one, with an old yellow bulb. Under it, on the sidewalk, someone was standing.
He was not doing anything. He stood with his hands in the pouch of a gray hooded sweatshirt, and his shoulders slightly hunched, and his weight on one foot, as if he had been waiting for a bus. The hood was down. The light fell on his hair, which was dark and short and a little uneven at the back, as though somebody had cut it at home. He was thin. His wrists were too long for his sleeves.
He was looking at Tom.
Tom did not move.
He did not feel afraid. That was the odd thing. He stood in the road in his socks with a bag of cat litter in his hand and felt a very large, very calm, very slow sensation, like the moment before a dream turns. He looked at the boy, and the boy looked back. There was no expression on his face. There was a kind of patience. It was the look of someone who has all night.
A car came down the street.
Its headlights swept across the front lawns, white and flat, and passed over the place where the boy stood, and lit it for a second like a stage.
There was nobody there.
The car went by. Its taillights shrank. The street was empty, and the streetlight hummed, and a little wind moved the dry leaves along the gutter.
Tom stood at the curb.
After a while he looked down, and saw that his hand had opened, and the bag lay on the road at his feet, spilling litter across the asphalt in a long gray fan.