At six o'clock, as the sky outside her kitchen window went from black to the color of a bruise to the color of weak tea, she opened her laptop and filed a public records request with the City of Calder for the body-worn camera footage of Officer K. Brandt, badge 2217, for the incident number Sergeant Amaro had written on the card, "including any pre-event buffer video," and for the dispatch audio, and for the CAD log, and for the full history of the stolen vehicle record associated with the VIN of her father's car. She filed a separate request with the Calder Regional Airport Authority for the Lot E security footage, and in the comments she wrote: Please preserve; I understand the retention period may be as short as thirty days. She sent short, factual emails to her chief pilot and her Guard commander, so that nobody would hear about it from anyone but her.
Then she went to the Accountability Board's website and read the complaint form twice, all the way through, the way she read an approach plate, and closed the laptop without filling it in.
Not yet, she thought. First the evidence. Then the story.
At seven-fifteen her phone buzzed. A text from a number she didn't know.
This is Odette Pryor from the shuttle. Hector gave me your number. I hope that's ok. Jaz didn't sleep either. She wants to know if you're alright. She made me promise to ask. She says to tell you she wrote down the time it happened in her notebook and the number on his car and the number on his badge because you said pilots write things down.
Naomi read it three times. Then she put her head down on her folded arms on the kitchen table, on top of her father's index card, and she cried for the first time since the hand had closed on her arm, hard and long and almost without sound, until it was done.
Then she sat up, wiped her face with the sleeve of her father's robe, and wrote back.
Tell Jaz I'm alright. Tell her thank you. Tell her that is exactly what pilots do.
* * *
Officer Kyle Brandt had been a police officer for six years and an airport police officer for seven weeks, and he had wanted the transfer because everyone told him the airport was quiet.
It had been quiet, right up until the catalytic converter thefts started in the employee lots. Eleven in three weeks. A battery here, a set of wheels there, and then two whole cars gone in one night from Lot E, a Honda and a Toyota, both belonging to flight attendants, one of whom had cried at the briefing counter while she filled out the report. The lieutenant had stood up at roll call the following Monday and said that the brass were embarrassed and the airlines were furious and the Airport Authority was talking about hiring private security, and he did not intend to let that happen on his watch. He wanted proactive patrols. He wanted contacts. He wanted officers out of their cars and walking the rows.
"You see somebody out there who doesn't belong," the lieutenant had said, "you find out why they're there."