None of the complaints had produced formal discipline. The files carried phrases like insufficient independent corroboration and officer judgment within operational discretion, which looked respectable when read separately. Together, they formed a pattern that Captain Drury had seen plainly enough to request Puit's removal from his precinct. The personnel department described the reassignment as a mutual compatibility decision, a phrase that managed to avoid saying whether anyone had done anything wrong.
Puit regarded the transfer as proof that the department could be persuaded to leave him alone. Union representative Dale Morrow had accompanied him through each administrative review, asking procedural questions, disputing witness reliability, and arranging negotiations that ended without formal findings. Morrow was practiced, influential, and proud of the fact that he could protect members even when their cases looked difficult. Puit confused that protection with a promise that the facts themselves would never matter.
Cedarwood Heights had seemed like a quiet exile at first. The streets were too orderly, the calls too infrequent, and the residents too quick to complain when a patrol car idled near their driveways. After a few weeks, however, Puit began interpreting the neighborhood differently. Wealth meant expensive vehicles, expensive tools, and people who could be frightened by the suggestion of losing access to the lives they had built. He had not yet found the confrontation he seemed to be waiting for, but he carried that expectation into every slow circuit of its streets.
On the Saturday Raymond polished his Chevelle, Puit had already driven past the main shopping area twice and completed a traffic warning that lasted less than four minutes. The incident left him restless rather than satisfied. He turned onto Maplewood Court at 9:47, expecting little more than a view of attractive houses and a chance to pass the time. Then he saw the midnight-green car in the driveway at the end of the street.
His attention settled first on the polished chrome, then on the broad-shouldered man in old work clothes leaning over it. Puit did not recognize Raymond Doss from departmental briefings, partly because he had never worked in Major Crimes and partly because he had spent years avoiding meetings that did not directly involve his own assignments. More important, he did not entertain the ordinary explanation available to anyone who looked at the bucket, hose, and sponge. He saw a man beside an expensive restored vehicle and decided the two did not belong together.
He slowed, then stopped at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. For one minute and fifty-seven seconds, as the camera across the street would later establish, he sat watching Raymond work. He made no dispatch inquiry, received no report of a theft, and identified no suspicious movement beyond a man washing a vehicle. He considered using the radio, then set it down. A minute later, the cruiser rolled forward, its emergency lights suddenly painting the neighborhood in blue and red.