A thin line of blood dropped from my split lip onto the tile. It was a small, bright thing, out of proportion to the attention it drew. I watched it land and spread just slightly against the grout line, and I thought, absurdly, about how many courtrooms I had sat in where blood had been described in clinical terms, where it had been an exhibit, a photograph, a line in a report. It is different when it is your own and it is still warm.
"You need medical attention," Doyle said.
"I need my property," I said.
"Of course," he said, too quickly, as if agreement could undo the sequence that had led here.
My phone was retrieved from the ledge where I had placed it before Brennan searched me. I remembered putting it there myself, deliberately, in plain sight, because I had wanted no ambiguity about what I was doing with my hands. My wallet came next. My notebook. My glasses were found several feet away beneath a bench, one lens popped loose from the frame, picked up separately, as if even my sight had been disassembled and set aside. My carry-on stood open near a pillar, and I looked at it and felt a tired anger settle in me that was not loud but was thorough. Clothing, my lunch, legal folders, marked pages scattered across the floor where Brennan had gone through them. Pages I had annotated in the margins, pages I had ordered for a reason, now face-down and stepped on, their order lost.
And then I saw what was missing from the immediate pile, and my eyes searched the rows of seats. The small wooden gavel paperweight my daughter had given me years earlier, when she was eleven, had rolled beneath a row of seats. It was not valuable in any way a court would recognize. It was not evidence. It was a child's carving, uneven, sanded by small hands, given to a father who kept it on his desk because it reminded him of who he had been before the robe. I did not say anything about it yet. I only noted where it had gone, and I filed that fact away with all the others.
Doyle turned to the crowd. "Everyone move along," he said. Then, with more authority, as if the first phrasing had not carried enough weight, "Airport police. Move along."
Some moved. Others stepped back only a few feet, far enough to comply in form and close enough to keep watching. The cameras stayed up. I have spent enough years in courtrooms to know what a phone held aloft means. It means the event will not be contained by an order to disperse. It means there will be versions, angles, edits. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and felt blood mark my skin, a smear across my knuckles, a reminder that I was not merely a participant in a misunderstanding but a man who had been put on the floor in a public terminal.
Doyle lowered his voice. "Judge Foster, if we could relocate somewhere private—"
"No," I said.
"Sir?" he said, and I could hear the surprise in it, the expectation that the title would make me cooperative.
"We are not moving anywhere yet," I said.
Brennan stared at me. The color had drained from his face, not all at once but in a slow, visible retreat, leaving him pale under the terminal lights. I watched his mind work, because I have watched that work before, in witnesses and in defendants and in lawyers who have just realized that the facts will not bend to the story they told. He was reconstructing, justifying, assembling a new version of events in real time, finding the sentences that would make what he had done sound reasonable, finding the order in which to place them so that the force came last and the fear came first. I did not interrupt him. There was nothing to interrupt. He was not speaking aloud. He was doing it behind his eyes, and I recognized it because I had seen it in a hundred courtrooms, and I knew how quickly it becomes the official memory if no one writes anything else down first.
I decided, standing there with blood on my mouth and my belongings scattered at my feet, that I would ask my questions here, where it had happened, before anyone moved me to a room designed to make the answers quieter.
"Officer," I said, turning to Holloway, "did you activate your body camera?"
"Yes, sir," she said.
"When?"
"Before the initial contact," she said, without hesitation.
"Did Officer Brennan?" I asked.
Holloway looked at him. It was a brief look, but it carried weight. Brennan said, "Yes."
"Captain Doyle?" I asked.
There was a brief hesitation, the kind that lasts only a second but tells you everything about how a person is weighing a question. "Yes," Doyle said.
"Good," I said.
I kept my voice level, because level is harder to dismiss than loud, and because I wanted the words to be clear on every recording that was running. "I requested preservation of nearby surveillance footage before Officer Brennan put me on the floor."
Doyle glanced at the ceiling. At least two visible cameras covered the concourse, their dark lenses pointed down at the space where I had been standing, where I had been searched, where I had been taken down. He knew they were there. I knew they were there. The crowd knew they were there.