Downstairs, she made three phone calls. The first was to Aaron's cell phone, which went to voicemail because he was, at that moment, repairing a stranger's heart. She left a message whose calm she was rather proud of afterward. "Aaron, it's me. Something has happened at the house. I am not hurt. I need you to call me when you're out of surgery, and I need you to drive home carefully when you come. Do not let anyone tell you a version of this before I do." The second call was to her chief deputy clerk, Hannah Kim, to say that a personal matter had arisen involving local police, that she would explain on Monday, and that Hannah was to put nothing in writing to anyone yet and to route any press call about her, of any kind, to the court's public information officer without comment. The third call was to a number she had carried in her phone for fifteen years and used twice: Diane Okafor, who had been her roommate in law school, who now practiced civil rights law three blocks from the courthouse, and who answered on the second ring with the words, "Tell me you're calling about brunch."
"Diane," Naomi said. "I need you to listen to me as a lawyer."
There was a pause, during which Naomi could hear her friend sit down.
"Go," Diane said.
Outside, Sergeant Linda Vasquez arrived in eleven minutes, which the neighbors would later be told was fast and which Naomi would privately note was eleven minutes. Vasquez was fifty, compact, silver-haired, a supervisor of the old school who kept a notebook bound in cracked leather and wrote in it with a pencil. She took in the scene in one slow look: the cruiser blocking the driveway, the coiled hose, the trampled rose bed, the scarf in the mulch, the cluster of residents standing at a respectful and furious distance, Holt positioned beside his vehicle with his arms folded in a posture of grievance that did not survive her arrival intact, and Daniel Price standing apart from his partner by several conspicuous feet, holding a radio he had already used and a small notepad on which he had written, in block capitals, with the time, everything he could remember.
Vasquez spoke to Holt first, briefly and at a volume no one else could hear, and whatever she said rearranged his posture completely. Then she spoke to Daniel, at slightly greater length. Then she walked up the Greers' path, knocked on the door of the yellow house with three measured raps, and waited with her hat in her hand like a parishioner.
Naomi opened the door.
"Judge Greer," Vasquez said. "I'm Sergeant Linda Vasquez, East Precinct. I'm the supervisor on duty. I've been given a preliminary account by both officers. I'd like to hear yours, in full, whenever you're ready, and I want you to know before you say a word that I have already ordered both officers' recordings preserved and both officers separated. Officer Holt will not be returning to this address in any capacity. That's not a promise about outcomes, ma'am. That's just the state of things as of now."
It was, Naomi thought, a well-constructed paragraph, and she mistrusted it slightly for exactly that reason, the way she mistrusted all well-constructed paragraphs offered to her by institutions. But the woman had taken her hat off, and the woman had said preserved and separated without being asked, and the woman had not once suggested that her officer had perhaps been confused, or that Judge Greer had perhaps misunderstood, or any of the other small rubber words with which bureaucracies cushion a fall.
"Come in, Sergeant," Naomi said. "I'll put coffee on. Yours will be hot. Mine went cold an hour ago, in another life."
They sat at the kitchen table where she had read the Langston brief that morning, which now seemed to her to belong to a work of fiction she had once been assigned. Naomi gave her account in chronological order, without ornament, stating times as approximations and saying so when she was approximating, distinguishing what she had seen from what she had heard from what she had concluded. It took nineteen minutes. Vasquez filled eleven pages of the cracked notebook and did not interrupt once, except to ask, at the end: "And the scarf, Judge. Where is it now?"
"In the mulch, where it fell."
"Then that's where it stays until photographs are taken. I'm going to ask you not to clean the yard, ma'am. I know how that sounds."
"It sounds like my front lawn is a crime scene, Sergeant."
"It sounds like that because at the moment I have to treat it as one. I understand the indignity of that on top of the rest."
Naomi looked at her for a moment, and something in her face must have shifted, because Vasquez closed the notebook, set the pencil down precisely parallel to it, and said the thing that supervisors were not trained to say and that Naomi would remember when, months later, she was asked whether anyone in the Portland Police Bureau had behaved well that day.