Puit shifted forward on the couch. "The guy knew exactly what he was doing. He could've shown that badge and ended it. He wanted to trap me." Morrow exhaled.
"Kyle, the question isn't whether he could have ended it. The question is whether you had a lawful reason to begin it." Puit said nothing. "And there's body-camera footage from first contact. They are preserving the whole recording, not just the part you think helps you."
"They always preserve the footage," Puit said. "And we've handled complaints before." Morrow rubbed a hand across his face, though Puit could not see him.
"The earlier cases had missing evidence, disputed statements, and procedural problems. This is a continuous recording of you making demands after a clean plate check and then opening a baton over a man standing in his driveway." He paused. "I've also heard a teenager filmed some of it."
Puit looked toward his apartment window, where the parking lot glimmered in the midday sun. He remembered the phone across the street and the boy standing behind it. At the time, he had dismissed the teenager as an annoyance. Now he found himself trying to remember which words he had used after the camera was raised. "You're supposed to represent me," he said, more sharply than he intended.
"I do represent you," Morrow answered. "That doesn't mean I can make a recording say something it doesn't." He promised to ensure Puit had representation during the administrative process and advised him not to contact witnesses. The call ended without the familiar reassurance Puit had received after every previous complaint. He sat on the couch for a long time, rehearsing the same explanation until he could almost believe it again.
Across the cul-de-sac, Gerald Pitts was cleaning out the storage folder on his home's security system. Gerald was sixty-two, a retired building contractor who installed four cameras after somebody stole a package from his porch eighteen months earlier. He had not been outside when the police arrived on Saturday. At the time, he was visiting his brother across town, and he only heard the story after Dorothy called to tell him what happened.
His front porch camera overlooked Maplewood Court from an elevated angle. It recorded the street entrance, the Doss driveway, and most of the route the cruiser took when it stopped. Gerald had expected to find a few minutes of ordinary traffic followed by a confrontation at the far edge of the frame. Instead, he saw Puit sit inside his cruiser for one minute and fifty-seven seconds, watching a man wash a car before the emergency lights appeared.
Gerald replayed the segment twice. The footage had a visible timestamp, and he could follow Puit's vehicle from the moment it entered the street. He could not know whether the officer spoke into a microphone inside the cruiser, but the recording established that there was no emergency movement and no visible suspicious conduct during the interval. It also showed Puit activating his lights before he approached Raymond, rather than responding to anything Raymond had said or done.