"Did she have anything that could have been a weapon."
He thought about the hair pick. "No."
Another silence. "Okay," Kalani said. "Here's what's going to happen. You're going to write it up tonight. Off-duty use of force, you know the form. You're going to write it while it's fresh and you're going to write it the way you just told it to me, not the way you'd tell it to a lawyer. You hear me? I don't want to see the words furtive or evasive anywhere in it. If you went in there with your mind made up, you write down that you went in there with your mind made up. If the father files with OPA, and he should, and I'd guess he will, I want whatever you wrote tonight to be the truest thing in that file."
"Yes, Sarge."
"And Kurt."
"Yeah."
"You don't go up there tonight. You don't knock on their door to explain yourself. I know you're going to want to. I can hear it. Don't. Whatever you've got to say to that family, it'll keep, and they don't owe you a chance to say it on your schedule."
He said he understood. He did understand. It did not stop him, after she hung up, from standing at the door of his apartment with his hand on the knob for almost a minute.
He wrote the report at the kitchen table on his laptop with a mug of coffee going cold beside him. It took him three hours. The form itself was not long, a dozen fields and a narrative box, but every sentence he wrote in the narrative box he wrote twice, once the way his hands wanted to write it and once the way it had happened, and then he deleted the first one. He wrote, I had received information from a resident that a juvenile female had been observed in the package room on prior Thursdays. He wrote, I did not attempt to verify the contents of the Fairmont delivery against the attached receipt before conducting a search. He wrote, The juvenile stated that I was hurting her. I did not immediately release my grip. He stopped after that sentence and sat with his hands flat on either side of the laptop for a long time. Then he wrote, I am not able to say with confidence why I did not release her when she asked, and he looked at that sentence until the screen went dark and he had to touch the trackpad to wake it.
That was not entirely true. He was able to say. He did not know how to say it in a box on a city form.