Neal Dwyer got to Natick fifty-five minutes early, because he had been awake since a quarter to four and there had been nothing left in the house to straighten. He had polished his shoes twice. He had shaved, cut himself under the jaw, stood at the bathroom sink with a square of toilet paper stuck to his neck like a postage stamp, and shaved again around it.
He had read the three pages folded inside his suit jacket so many times that the creases had gone soft and furry, and at five-thirty, when the kitchen window was still black and Maureen was still asleep, he had sat at the table with a cup of coffee he did not drink and read them out loud to the refrigerator, and his voice had sounded to him like a man reading a warranty.
The Parole Board was not where most people thought it would be. People thought of a courthouse, columns, steps, a flag. It was a two-story brick office building in a business park off Route 9, between an orthodontist and a company that did something with medical billing, and the only sign that it was any different from its neighbors was a small blue plaque by the door with the seal of the Commonwealth on it and the words PAROLE BOARD in raised letters that somebody kept polished. There was a row of young maples along the parking lot, planted in mulch islands, and in the second week of October they had gone the bright, hard red of a stop sign, every one of them, as if the landscapers had ordered them that way.
He parked the truck at the far end of the lot, under the last maple. He sat with the engine off. He took the Glock out of the holster on his belt, cleared it, locked it in the steel box bolted under the seat, and put the magazine in the glove compartment, the way he had for thirty-four years before he walked into any building that had a metal detector and a sign about weapons. He left the badge where it was, clipped inside his belt on the left side, under the jacket. A badge was not a weapon. A badge was just a habit you wore.
He unwrapped a stick of gum. Big Red. He had been chewing it since the academy, since an instructor named Coughlin had told the class that a cop who smelled like coffee and cigarettes made people nervous and a cop who smelled like cinnamon made them think of their grandmother's kitchen, and Neal had quit the cigarettes in 1997 and never quit the gum. Maureen said the smell was in the upholstery of every car he had ever owned. She said she could find him in a dark church by it.
At eight-forty he went in.
There was a vestibule with two sets of glass doors, and a lobby beyond it with gray carpet and a drop ceiling and a row of padded chairs along one wall, the kind with chrome arms, joined together so nobody could move them. A security desk sat by the inner doors with a walk-through detector beside it and a uniformed officer behind it, a broad, unhurried man with SANDOVAL on his nameplate and a paperback face-down by his elbow. On the far wall there was a corkboard behind a sheet of plexiglass, and on the corkboard, pinned square, was a single typed page.
Neal went through the detector. It did not go off. He had taken his keys and his phone and his change out and put them in a gray plastic tub, and he collected them on the other side and put them back in the pockets where they had always been, and Sandoval watched him do it with the mild, approving look of one professional watching another.
"You here for a hearing, sir?"