Shirlene had called him into the leasing office the following Monday.
She was a small, energetic woman in her fifties who wore cardigans in every season and kept a jar of butterscotch candies on her desk that nobody, in Kurt's experience, had ever been offered. She ran four properties for Treadwell Residential, which was owned by her brother-in-law, and her job consisted mostly of absorbing anger from tenants and redirecting it upward to owners, or downward to people like Kurt. She had his September summary in front of her and a printout of something else beside it, and she had turned the printout facedown, which meant she wanted him to ask what it was.
He did not ask. She told him anyway.
It was a letter signed by eleven residents. It said that the building had experienced an unacceptable level of property crime since the summer and that the residents had been assured by management that a police officer lived on site, and that they wished to know what, specifically, that officer had done. It said that several of the signatories were considering their options with respect to lease renewal. It used the phrase material misrepresentation, which meant that one of the eleven was a paralegal, or had a cousin who was.
"I'm not blaming you," Shirlene said. "I want to be very clear. I'm not blaming you, Kurt."
"Okay."
"But I've got the owner asking me what we're getting for forty-eight hundred dollars a year."
He had not thought of it that way before, as a number, the four hundred times twelve. He did the math in his head and it was right.
"I'm a patrol officer," he said. "I'm not a detective. I can't stake out a closet."
"Nobody's asking you to stake out a closet."