The Game Changer, стр. 61
My mind swirled, trying to absorb everything he was saying. Back in Chicago, if someone ran you down in the middle of the day, there’d be so many witnesses coming forward, the police would be turning people away.
“What happened?” I asked as I waded through the crowd, hoping someone had seen something and just hadn’t told the police yet. “Anyone see what happened?”
“I heard a car screech and didn’t think anything of it,” an older lady said, her hair wrapped up in curlers. “I’m deaf in one ear, you know, so I’m not sure which direction it even came from.”
Seemed everyone had a similar story. I was in the shower. I had on my headphones. I was talking to my mother. I was watching TV.
Truly, nobody saw anything. Or they did, and they weren’t talking. But, given the worried looks on their faces, I doubted that.
Slowly, I made my way to the front of the crowd. The paramedics had loaded her up and taken off, sirens sounding.
I watched as they wheeled her away, and the chief silently inventoried the space where she’d been. With the grim centerpiece gone, the neighbors all began to drift away. But not me. I was interested in what Chief Henderson found on the scene. This time, I wasn’t going to walk away until he did. I wasn’t going to miss a single thing if I could help it.
He sifted through the mail, then dropped it into a bag. Picked up a cracked cell phone and bagged it, too.
“Was she talking on the phone when she got hit?” I called.
The chief glanced at me, then did a double take, his face clouding over with insta-rage.
“Brooks!”
Brooks looked like he wanted to saunter away with the residents. “Sir?”
The chief pointed at me with the bag of phone. “I told you to keep her away.”
Brooks’s focus ping-ponged between us, then he straightened up, cleared his throat, and stood tall, separating us. “Sir, she’s the press. She’s here because it’s the scene of an accident.”
“Attempted murder,” I said.
“She also knew the accident victim.”
“Victim of an attempted murder,” I said.
“And she…” I could see him measuring his words, could imagine him weighing whether or not he was about to step on toes that would make his life miserable all over again. His jaw tightened as he made the decision. “She has the right to be wherever she wants to be. It’s a free country. Chief.”
The chief chewed his bottom lip, taking in everything Brooks said with a look of growing disgust. “She has a right, does she?”
“Yes, sir,” Brooks said, steely, resolute. Handsome.
Chief Henderson stepped around the crime scene and came toward me, angrily gesturing with the plastic bags that he had—one in each hand. “Well, you may have a right to be here. But you don’t have a right to get involved in my investigation. And you don’t have the right to make public accusations against my son.”
“I didn’t.” It came out a whisper. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little bit afraid of Chief Henderson. And I felt awful. Even though I knew that my intentions were right, I could see how the things I’d said could feel to a father who just wanted to protect his son. “I never pointed any fingers..”
“Everyone is listening. They know exactly who you’re not talking about.”
Wait, what? Really? Everyone? Why didn’t that feel like a victory? “I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly wishing that nobody had been listening.
He waved a bag toward me again. “You can stay here, but if you step one toe over that line right there, I will arrest you.” We all looked to the police tape, which was still unsecured and waving in the wind. “Brooks, fix that,” he snapped, and went back to work.
I watched silently as he continued to bag things. An earring. A single house slipper. The wind blew and a balled up piece of paper tumbled away from the scene and butted against the toe of my shoe. I looked at it and then at the chief, who didn’t seem to notice. Had it been on the scene, or had it simply been blowing around, the same way the coach had coincidentally dropped on a hair net with long, red hair in it.
Slowly, carefully, I stepped on the paper. Then dropped my pencil, then bent to retrieve it. In the same motion, I picked up the paper and slipped it into my pocket.
The chief, finished and pleased with his work, went back to his car, got in, and sat there writing into a pad of his own.
“Is that it?” I asked.
Brooks looked up. He’d been trying to wind the tape back onto the spool, but it was just a wad of unruly plastic. “Looks like it,” he said. “Anything interesting?”
I thought about the paper in my pocket. I wanted to share it with him. After all, he had just gone to bat for me against the chief, which was surely going to blow back on him in a bad way. And he had done it for me, which told me he either really liked me or really believed I had a right to investigate the case. Maybe he even believed I could solve it. Either way, he believed in me. But it wasn’t him I didn’t trust; it was the chief. That chief was undoubtedly doubly motivated to get rid of me now, and I didn’t want Brooks getting caught in the middle any more than he already had. “Nope. Plain, old crime scene, I’m afraid.”
He shuffled a few steps sideways so we could hear each other better. “Between you and me, he doesn’t have a clue who’s behind this