And there had been the article, in the Enterprise, a week ago Sunday. SON OF BROCKTON SERGEANT SEEKS PAROLE IN 2011 STABBING. There had been a photograph of Sean at nineteen, the booking photograph, his face swollen down one side, his eyes like holes. There had been a photograph of Elijah Galvin in his cap and gown. There had been a paragraph near the bottom that said the hearing was public and would be held at the board's offices in Natick, and the date, and the time.
So people knew. Anybody could come. That was the law, and Neal believed in the law, or had built a life on the premise that he did, which by sixty-one he had come to understand was not quite the same thing.
The woman had photographed his son's name. She had looked at him as if she knew his face. She had sat down by the inner door, as near to it as a person could get, and she was reading something to herself over and over, rehearsing it.
He took the gum out of his mouth and wrapped it in the foil and put it in his pocket. He crossed the lobby. He did not hurry. He had crossed a thousand rooms like this one, in apartment buildings and emergency rooms and the back offices of package stores at two in the morning, and he knew how to do it so that the person watching him come understood, before he had said a word, how the conversation was going to go. Shoulders square. Hands loose. Eyes on the face, not the hands, so they knew you had already looked at the hands.
She saw him coming. She did not get up. She closed the manila envelope over whatever she had been reading and laid her palm flat on top of it.
He stopped in front of her chair, near enough. He reached inside his jacket and took out the badge wallet and let it fall open, the way it was made to, and held it at the height of her eyes.
"Neal Dwyer," he said. "Sergeant, Brockton Police." He let her look at it. "I'm going to ask you once. Who are you with, and what are you doing at my son's hearing?"
She looked at the badge. She did not look at it the way most people did, with the little flinch in the eyes. She looked at it the way a woman looks at a price tag on something she has already decided not to buy. Then she looked up at him.
"Good morning, Sergeant," she said.
"You took a picture of the docket."