Chapter 6
The police arrived twelve minutes after Ryan's call.
Victoria sat at my kitchen table across from two officers and a detective, and the camera footage was on Ryan's phone, and the death certificate and custody papers were on the table, and the two men in dark suits had attempted to leave and had been persuaded to remain, and what followed was the specific procedural work of an evening that had been documented from its first minute.
The detective who reviewed the footage was thorough. She watched it twice and asked me specific questions about the timeline and the sequence and the exact words that had been used, and I answered them in the precise order they had occurred because I had been paying attention to the precise order in which they occurred, which was a thing I had practiced over three years of legal work and which turned out to be exactly the skill the situation required.
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Victoria retained an attorney the following morning. Her attorney reviewed the footage and the physical evidence and the testimony of the two men, who had each provided detailed accounts in exchange for considerations that were arranged with the district attorney's office, and by the end of the first week her attorney had the specific expression of counsel who understands what the case they are managing is worth and what it is not.
The criminal proceedings took eight months. I was not the witness who testified longest, but I was the one whose account the prosecution led with, because the footage was the center of the case and the footage required me to explain what I was wearing and why and what I had been thinking at each point in the recording, and I explained it in the same order I had explained it to the detective, clearly and specifically and without drama, the way you explain something you have been preparing to explain since the moment you pressed a button that was not a button.
