He sat. He was a careful man. I'd read his personnel file the night before, all of it. Twenty-eight years in, mostly in Fernhill, a few in the sheriff's office before that. Commendations. Two old excessive-force complaints, both unsustained. A reputation, according to the two retired officers I'd quietly called from Richmond in August, as the man who actually ran the place while Breedlove went to Rotary lunches.
"I want to be straight with you," I said, "because I think you'd see through anything else. I've requested an outside review of the nuisance property program and the partnership program. It went to the SBI this morning, jointly with the DA. I've ordered all records preserved. As of nine o'clock, Sergeant Dobrowski is being reassigned to the day desk pending that review. The city manager has asked me to tell you that he's placing you on paid administrative leave, effective immediately, also pending the review. That's his decision, not mine, because I've got a conflict. I live in one of the houses."
His face didn't change much. A muscle in his jaw jumped once. "I don't know what you think you've found."
"I don't think I've found anything, Garrett. I'm not the one looking. That's the point."
"You've been here three weeks."
"I have. And in three weeks, an HOA president used a direct line to your liaison sergeant to call the police on my father because he was standing on a sidewalk, and my address was already flagged as a chronic nuisance because of the calls on the man who lived there before me, whose house was sold at a lien foreclosure to an LLC organized by your wife." I said it without heat. "Maybe there's an innocent explanation. If there is, the SBI will find it, and you'll be back at your desk, and I'll apologize to you in front of the whole department. I mean that."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, in a much lower voice, "Do you know how many drug houses that ordinance closed? Do you know what that neighborhood was like?"
"Everybody keeps telling me that," I said. "Nobody's told me yet what it was like for the people who lived in it."
He stood up. He took his badge off his belt and his ID card off his lanyard and set them on my desk, side by side, very neatly. "I'll want my union rep," he said.