Alicia looked down at the photographs again. "That's what I needed to hear."
Across town, Deputy Daniel Price was learning how quickly people could become strangers when an institution was under pressure. His patrol schedule was changed pending an outside review of the roadside stop, and rumors spread before any official explanation did. Some colleagues told him privately that they supported his decision to speak. Others stopped answering his messages, as though a conversation with him might be interpreted as choosing a side. A senior deputy he had admired advised him to stay quiet about Mercer because no one knew how the investigation would end.
"I'm not trying to bring down the department," Price said.
"Doesn't matter what you're trying to do," the older man replied. "People will remember who talked."
Price went home angry and worried. His apartment was small, with books stacked beside the sofa and a kitchen table too narrow for more than two people. He placed his uniform shirt over a chair and sat looking at the notebook that contained his earlier warehouse observations. When he opened it, he found the date of his conversation with Mercer written in the careful handwriting he had developed in college. Beneath the report numbers, he had written a phrase he remembered exactly: Don't make a career problem out of a clerical problem.
He had underlined it twice.
The words frightened him more now than they had in the sheriff's office, because he understood the threat was not just personal. If an officer could be discouraged from reporting missing records, then an ordinary resident with less standing could be discouraged even more easily. Price imagined someone whose property had been searched, or whose complaint had been dismissed, without an independent investigator waiting three blocks away. He wondered how many people had gone home believing they had no useful place to tell the truth.
His mother called that evening. She had seen the television coverage and wanted to know whether he was safe. Price told her he was, then admitted that he no longer knew whether he would have a career in Westbridge. She listened without rushing him, the way she had listened when he was a child struggling to explain something embarrassing. When he finally stopped talking, she asked a question that made him sit up.
"Danny, did you tell them what happened?"
"Yes."
"And was it the truth?"
"Yes."
"Then you've done one thing you can explain to yourself tomorrow. The rest will take more work."
He laughed softly. His mother had no law enforcement experience, but she had spent decades helping people find information they did not know how to ask for. She was rarely impressed by someone claiming authority over a question. Price wished he had remembered that on the day he first saw the warehouse reports. Then he reminded himself that regret was only useful if it changed what he did next.