"How are the wrists?" she said.
"They'll be fine," he said.
She nodded. "The U.S. Attorney's Office is going to push for the maximum on the assault charge. The obstruction and the surveillance destruction will layer on top of it."
"Good," Harmon said.
He didn't say it with satisfaction. He said it the way you say something that is simply correct.
They stood there for another minute, watching the city come slowly back to light.
"He saw a Black man in a hoodie in a dark building," Harmon said, "and he wrote the rest of the story before I said a single word. Everything after that was just him defending the story he had already written."
Baines was quiet.
"The thing about that," Harmon continued, "is that the story was always going to cost somebody. I've been doing this long enough to know that. Tonight, it cost him."
He put his jacket back on, straightening the lapels, and clipped his credentials back to his belt.
"I'd like to close out the secondary targets before the end of the month."
"We'll start fresh in the morning," Baines said.
"It is the morning," he said.
She almost smiled. "In a few hours, then."
Harmon walked toward the elevator, the credential badge on his belt catching a single edge of early light as the doors opened. He stepped inside, and the doors closed behind him, and the parking structure was quiet.
Three months later, in a federal courtroom on Lafayette Boulevard, Dade Culvin stood before Judge Aveene Royce in an ill-fitting borrowed suit and pleaded guilty to assaulting a federal officer and obstruction of an active investigation.
The plea agreement, reduced from the full charge list in exchange for a recorded statement that had assisted in the location of one of the two remaining secondary targets, carried a sentence of seven years in a federal correctional facility, with no eligibility for early release under the standard provisions.
When the judge announced the sentence, Culvin turned briefly toward the gallery, as though looking for something.
What he found was Clarence Harmon, seated in the second row in the same dark suit. His expression carried none of the satisfaction that Culvin had perhaps expected, and none of the forgiveness that Culvin had perhaps hoped for. Just the same unflinching attention that had been there from the moment the flashlight beam found him on that warehouse floor.
The attention of a man who had learned, at great cost and over many years, that composure was not a luxury in this work, but a form of armor. And who had simply been wearing it the entire time.
Culvin looked away first.
The bailiff moved him toward the side door, and the door swung shut, and the courtroom filled with the ordinary sounds of a proceeding that was over.
Harmon stood, buttoned his jacket, and walked out into the Detroit summer, where the work was already waiting.