Part One: The Morning Before
I have a routine for the mornings before difficult hearings.
I wake at five-thirty. I make coffee — the same Ethiopian blend I have been buying from the same shop on Meredith Street for eleven years, ground the night before, measured precisely, because the precision is part of the ritual. I sit for twenty minutes with the coffee and the case files, not reading them again — I have already read them, have read everything multiple times — but sitting with them, letting the day’s arguments settle into their right weight before I take them into the courtroom.
I am not a person who flutters.
I have been told this, over the years, in ways that were meant as compliments and ways that were not. A former colleague once described me as the most unflutterable person he had ever encountered in thirty years of law. He meant it admiringly. My ex-husband used the same word, in a different tone, which was part of why he eventually became my ex-husband.
On the morning of the fourteenth — a Thursday in November, the kind of gray, cold morning that the city produced in quantity at that time of year — I was sitting with my coffee and my files at six-fifteen when I felt the particular quality of focus that settled over me before hearings that mattered. The Williams case was not a simple case. It was a police misconduct hearing involving allegations against four officers from the third district, allegations that had been documented, corroborated, and contested in ways that were going to require the kind of careful, steady attention that I had spent twenty years developing.
The irony of what was about to happen did not register until afterward, when I was telling the story to my sister and she put her hand over her mouth and said: you’re serious. I was serious. The universe had a particular sense of timing that I had learned, as a judge, to find professionally interesting.
I left the house at seven forty-five. I drove the same route I always drove to the courthouse — down Carver Boulevard, across the Meridian Bridge, south on Federal to the parking structure. Fourteen minutes on a clear morning. I was mentally in the hearing already — running through the procedural questions I expected to face in the first hour, the arguments I anticipated from both sides, the specific points where I would need to be most precise.
I was thinking about protocol.
I was, always, thinking about protocol.
The lights appeared in my rearview mirror on the Carver Boulevard stretch, before the bridge. Red and blue, the particular combination that I had seen ten thousand times from the bench and perhaps a hundred times from the driver’s seat, and each time from the driver’s seat produced the same response: a check of the speedometer, a pull toward the curb, a composed and practiced readiness to comply.
I pulled over.
I turned off the engine.
I placed my hands on the wheel.
I waited.
