Nora waited outside the room with a cup of water. When Grace emerged, the organizer apologized again, this time without attempting to explain why the advance list had failed to protect the event. Grace asked her to preserve the planning emails and the guest roster. Nora agreed at once, then asked whether it would help if the committee issued a public statement.
"First preserve the records," Grace told her. "Statements can come afterward. There are people whose names need to be accurate in whatever you say."
The colonel took a call from Captain Greene. The captain had arranged an independent evidence team and would seek outside review because the sheriff's office could not credibly investigate every allegation against its own senior personnel without scrutiny. She wanted an initial statement from Grace before the end of the day, but she would accommodate her schedule and medical needs. Grace agreed to speak after the remaining wreath ceremony, provided the interviews were recorded and separate from Perkins's account.
In the staging area, Dwight Perkins sat in an empty conference room at the county government annex. A deputy from another district had collected his duty weapon, badge, and radio as part of a temporary administrative reassignment. Perkins had not been formally arrested, and that distinction frustrated the reporters already asking why no one had put handcuffs on him. The absence of handcuffs did not mean the incident was being ignored; it meant investigators were taking care not to substitute public anger for legal process.
Perkins did not understand that distinction either. He understood only that the radio call had ended his control of the situation and that a supervisor had taken his equipment in view of the crowd. He demanded to call his father. Captain Greene told him he was free to contact counsel and the union, but that he could not use departmental phones to coordinate stories with witnesses. His first thought was not about Grace or the teenager who had watched him tear her uniform. It was about how the people at his station would talk about him.
"She's going to make this a political issue," he told the union representative who returned his call. "You know how these things go."
The representative, a cautious attorney named Daniel Rourke, asked him what physical contact had occurred. Perkins said he had removed false insignia from a suspect. Rourke asked whether Grace had presented identification. Perkins paused, then said it had looked suspicious. Rourke repeated the question: had she presented identification or not?
"Yes," Perkins admitted. "But I didn't believe it was real."
Rourke asked what specific evidence supported that belief. Perkins told him the woman did not seem like a general. The attorney stayed quiet for several seconds, and Perkins began to feel the first real fear of the day. He had expected his representative to help him find words that sounded official. Instead, the man was asking the same questions the radio voice had asked.