"I'll need to bring her in," he said finally. "Ask her some questions. That's standard, given the report. But, Walter, I want to be straight with you. If what those other witnesses are describing checks out, this isn't going to look the way you want it to look."
"Let me worry about how it looks," Walter said. "I've got a council seat and a re-election coming, Marcus. I'd appreciate you handling this quickly and quietly."
Doyle didn't answer that directly. He'd been chief long enough to know exactly what "quickly and quietly" usually meant, coming from a man like Walter Colton, and he didn't much care for it.
But a report was a report, and procedure was procedure.
And so, an hour later, an officer knocked on the door of Miller's Bakery and asked, politely but firmly, for Ren Hail to come down to the station.
Marjorie stood in the doorway, flour still dusting her apron, watching the patrol car pull away with Ren in the passenger seat.
"This is wrong," she said to no one in particular. "This is just wrong."
Frank arrived 20 minutes later, cane in hand, having heard the news from Earl, who had heard it from someone at the pharmacy who'd seen the whole thing on the sidewalk.
Norah came too. Discharged from the clinic, baby fine, but pale with the particular fury of a mother who has just watched somebody who protected her get punished for it.
"We need to give statements," Frank said grimly. "Every single one of us who saw any part of this. That boy's father isn't going to let the truth win on its own. We have to help it along."
"I'll go right now," Norah said, one hand still resting protectively on her stomach.
"I'm coming with you," Frank said.
Marjorie looked at the closed sign she was about to flip on the bakery door, glanced once at the ovens still warm behind her, and made her decision without a second thought.
"Lock up behind me," she told the empty shop, and went to get her coat.
At the station, the three of them gave their statements one after another, in a small room down the hall from where Ren was being held. Though none of them were told that, and none of them saw her.
Frank went first, walking a young officer named Petrov through the whole sequence. The cane knocked to the floor. His knee buckling. Grant's laugh. The way it had felt, he said carefully, like the boy hadn't even registered him as a person. Just an obstacle in a hallway.
"He's done this before," Frank added, unprompted. "Not to me. To her. To Ren. Every morning for weeks, best I can tell. This town's let it slide because of who his father is. I'd like that written down, if it's all the same to you."
Petrov wrote it down.
Norah went next, one hand resting on her stomach the whole time, voice steady even though her hands weren't quite. She described the grab, the stumble, the half second where she genuinely thought she might fall.