"And Mr. Lindqvist."
Curtis turned back.
"Tell her I said the water off the locks is good water. Arne picked well." For the first time all day, something eased in the captain's face. "Smoothest ride I've flown in a year. You tell her that too."
* * *
The summons came in November. Desmond knew because Sergeant Whitfield called to tell him, which she did not have to do.
"He didn't fight it," she said. "His lawyer wanted to. Kept talking about the purse, the context, the thefts at the airport. Lindqvist told him to stop. Pled to third-degree assault. Deferred judgment, eighteen months probation, a fine, a bias course, a hundred hours of community service. And there's a restorative justice piece, if you're willing. You don't have to be."
"What does that involve?"
"A room. A facilitator. Him and you, and the guard if you want him there. You say what it cost you. He has to sit and listen. No lawyers. No speeches."
Desmond thought about it for three days. Celeste did not tell him what to do. On the fourth day he called Whitfield back and said yes.
The room was on the fourth floor of a city building on West Colfax, with a window that looked out on a parking structure and a round table with a box of tissues in the middle of it that nobody touched. The facilitator was a retired schoolteacher with a soft voice and an iron spine. Brent Kowalczyk came too, in a sport coat that did not fit, and sat with his big hands knotted together on the table. The security contractor had suspended him for thirty days and sent him to a de-escalation course, and he said, haltingly, looking at the table, that he had taken the guard job because he couldn't get on with the police department, and that he had thought the whole job was spotting the bad guy, and that nobody had ever told him the job might mostly be not deciding who the bad guy was until you knew. He said he was sorry. He said it four or five times, like a man who had only one tool and kept reaching for it.
Curtis said less. He had lost weight. He told them, plainly, without arranging any of it, that he had gone to Pete Dunleavy the Monday after Seattle and told him everything before the company could hear it from anybody else, and that the Ridgeline account had gone to Toby Fisk, and that the regional director job had gone to Toby Fisk, and that he had been moved off the road and into an inside estimating role at a desk in Englewood, and that he had thought, for about a week, that his life was over.
"And then?" said the facilitator.
"And then I realized I'd been home for dinner with my mother every night for a week," Curtis said. "For the first time in about twenty years."