I went home that night and looked up Tidewater Home Solutions, LLC, on the North Carolina Secretary of State's website, which is public and which anybody can search. The registered agent was a law office in Raleigh. The organizer, four years ago, was listed as Tamara D. Kessling.
I sat in my kitchen and looked at that name for a long time. Tamara, the pleasant agent with the expensive hand lotion. Kessling, like Garrett Kessling, the deputy chief of the Fernhill Police Department, who had run the department's day-to-day operations under Chief Breedlove for six years, who supervised the community liaison program, whose signature, I would bet my pension, was on the chronic nuisance designations as the chief's designee, and who had been told three weeks ago that he would not be the next chief, because someone from Richmond was.
I didn't sleep much that night. Around two, I heard the click of a flashlight on the sidewalk, and the footsteps slowed in front of my house, and stopped, and after a while they went on.
On the morning of September eleventh, four days before I was to be sworn in, I put on a navy suit for the first time since the funeral and drove to City Hall and asked to see the city manager and the city attorney together.
Ignatius Rafferty was the city manager, a lanky, rumpled man of about sixty with half-glasses on a cord and the permanently amused expression of somebody who'd survived nineteen years of small-town politics. He was the one who'd hired me. Priscilla Nwosu was the city attorney, younger, maybe forty, precise, with her hair in neat twists and a legal pad she wrote on in tiny block capitals. We sat in Rafferty's office with the door closed, and I told them everything. The truck. The finger. The notices. My father on the sidewalk at four-twenty-six in the morning. The ordinance, the covenant, the ledger, the seven sales. The name on the Secretary of State's website.
I gave it to them in order, with dates, the way I'd have wanted it given to me. It took about forty minutes. When I was done, Rafferty took off his half-glasses and rubbed his eyes.
"Well," he said. "Hell."
Priscilla Nwosu didn't say anything for a while. She was writing. Then she put her pen down and said, "Chief Quarterman—"
"Not yet."
"Mrs. Quarterman. Why are you telling us this before you're sworn in?"