Rourke treat a man's birthday party as an opportunity to demonstrate dominance, and he could not find a way to make that fit the promise he made when he first put on the uniform. After Elise went to bed, he opened a blank document and began writing down what had actually happened.
Across town, Captain Sloane met with Karen Bellamy at a coffee shop away from the main street. Karen had called him twice since the scene at the Reed house, alternating between anger that the police had backed down and fear that someone might demand the original video from her phone. Sloane ordered tea he did not drink and told her to stop posting about the incident. "You said it was under control," Karen replied, leaning forward. "You promised your detail would make a point about these backyard parties."
"I promised to respond to credible complaints," Sloane said. "I did not promise that you could dictate arrests on camera." Karen laughed once, incredulously. "Don't pretend you're innocent now. You told me exactly who to contact when the neighborhood committee needed an immediate response. I used the number you gave me, and six officers arrived like you said they would."
The captain stared at her across the table. "Lower your voice," he said. Karen's phone lay face down beside her coffee, still in the same pink case she had carried into the Reed yard. She had become so used to recording other people that she sometimes forgot she could create a record of herself. "I didn't do anything except report a nuisance," she insisted. "Your people are the ones who knocked him down."
Sloane did not disagree. He was concerned less about the injured man than about the information that might surface if reporters began examining how the Community Response Detail was deployed. For eighteen months he had accepted private complaints from a small group of influential residents and routed them around the normal dispatch prioritization process. The program's official justification was that chronic nuisance calls needed faster attention, but Sloane had never produced an independent analysis showing that those favored callers reported any greater danger than other residents.
On Tuesday morning, the city manager, Nora Whitaker, convened an emergency administrative meeting. She was a former transportation director who had earned a reputation for reading budgets down to the last line and refusing to be intimidated by people who found procedure inconvenient. Marcus did not attend the portion of the meeting dealing with his complaint. Naomi submitted the family evidence through their attorney, while an independent investigator contracted by the city began interviewing witnesses and the district attorney requested state assistance.
Nora asked the police chief, Patrick Hale, a simple question: Why had the Community Response Detail sent six officers and three cars to a reported smoke disturbance? Hale said he had not seen the initial dispatch record. Nora placed the record on the table and asked him to read the priority code aloud. He paused, looked again and said, "Possible disorderly gathering, multiple subjects."