"No, Sergeant."
"Neither did I. I looked her up. You're on the desk until this goes through the Board. That's procedure. But listen to me, as somebody who's been doing this twenty-nine years. That woman did everything right. She did everything right, and you put her on the ground in her uniform in front of a twelve-year-old girl. I've watched it. Go home and watch it yourself. And then think real hard about what you're going to say when they ask you why."
* * *
He did watch it. He watched it on his laptop at his kitchen table after his wife, Kara, had gone to bed and their son, Wyatt, who was three, was asleep in the next room with the door cracked and the hall light on. The buffer was strange to watch: silent, slightly jerky, the picture lurching along with his own walk as he crossed the lot. He watched himself approach the car from behind. He watched the woman bent over the fender, her flashlight steady, the hammer held loosely, not raised, pointing down. He watched her turn her head, once, toward the shuttle shelter, and lift the hammer in what was very clearly a little wave. He had not seen the wave that night. He had not seen the shuttle. He had seen nothing at all but the coat and the hammer and the car.
He watched his own hand come into the frame and close on her arm.
Then the sound came on, mid-sentence, his own voice saying something about thefts, and he watched the rest, and when it was over he sat in his dark kitchen and did not move for a long time.
Then he did something he would not have done if he had been a different kind of man, or perhaps if he had been the kind of man he thought he was. He logged into the department records system from home with his own credentials, which he was permitted to do, and he pulled up the legacy file on the VIN, which he was not strictly forbidden to do, and he read it.
Calder Police Department. Stolen vehicle report. Date: August 9, 1979. Vehicle: 1972 Buick Skylark, green. Complainant: BRANDT, RAYMOND J. Business: Brandt Auto Sales, 2240 Fulton Ave. Narrative: Complainant states vehicle was removed from lot by WHITFIELD, WALTER E., B/M, age 31, without completion of payment. Requests recovery.
Disposition: Suspect arrested 8/14/79. Vehicle recovered from suspect. Case referred to prosecutor.
And then a second line, added later, in a different typeface. Prosecution declined 9/27/79. Vehicle released to WHITFIELD. And then nothing. No cancellation. No clearance. A record left hanging, like a door left open in an empty house, for forty-seven years.
Raymond J. Brandt.
His grandfather's car lot had closed when Kyle was in kindergarten. He had one memory of it, a bright blurry one, of sitting on a high stool in a little glass office eating a grape popsicle while his father, Ray, laughed on the phone, and of strings of red and white plastic flags clattering against the window in the wind. His grandfather had died when Kyle was four, and his father, rather than run the place alone, had sold the land to a tire chain within the year and then worked for twenty years in the parts department at a Ford dealership out by the interstate, and then retired. Ray Brandt was eighty-one now. He lived alone in the same split-level on the north side where Kyle had grown up. He watched baseball and fixed lawnmowers for the neighbors and complained about his knees. He was, as far as Kyle had ever known, a decent and ordinary man, a little loud, a little quick to tell a joke that was not as funny as he thought it was.