"Yes. It's where the incidents happened, and it will help establish distances and camera angles. It won't be a public trial. The investigators will control the process, and uninvolved officers will be there to keep the scene orderly."
Malik looked through the windshield toward the road home. He wanted the investigation to end as much as anyone, but he had no wish to host the people who had harassed him inside the space they had tried to claim was not his. Still, the driveway and porch had become central to the evidence, and he understood why Martinez wanted to examine the place rather than rely entirely on images. He agreed on the condition that no one treat the visit as an opportunity for a public confrontation or an informal punishment.
"I will be there as the homeowner and a witness," he said. "Not as the chief giving orders."
Ward nodded. "That's how it will be documented."
Before leaving, Malik asked for a written copy of the notice concerning his administrative leave and the process for reconsidering it. Ward promised to forward the independent findings without involving him in any decisions about Halbrook's employment. They had both learned how quickly the perception of favoritism could grow when a powerful person became personally involved in a dispute. The difference now was that the record could show the precautions they had taken, not merely their good intentions.
The day of the final site review began quietly. Malik woke early, made coffee in the kitchen he had finally managed to unpack, and opened the front blinds to a street that looked perfectly ordinary. A delivery van passed beneath the oak trees, a young boy walked a dog on the opposite sidewalk, and someone several houses away was washing windows. The calm almost made him resentful, because it showed how easily a neighborhood could return to routine while one family was still trying to recover from what happened there.
He dressed in a plain blue shirt and dark trousers rather than the suit he wore to city meetings. He did not want the occasion to resemble a police chief's inspection, nor did he want clothing to become another symbol for people to argue over. The physical marks on his wrist had faded, but he had kept the photographs and medical notes from the days when the restraint still hurt. They were part of the evidence, not something he intended to display.
Ward arrived first. She carried a folder with the review notice, the updated administrative-leave status, and the documents Malik would be asked to sign when the site work concluded. Moreno arrived with Martinez in a state investigative vehicle, and two neutral officers parked farther down the street. The officers had been instructed to keep the participants separated and to act only under the investigator's direction, a precaution Malik welcomed after everything he had seen on his property.
Martinez walked the driveway once before inviting the other parties to approach. She checked where Malik's sedan had been parked during the first detention and where the moving truck had waited when Vivien blocked the entrance. She examined the porch steps, the front-door camera, and the view from the garage eaves. Using photographs and measurements rather than memory alone, she confirmed that the cameras had clear lines of sight to the movements disputed in the complaints.