The department's internal inquiry, meanwhile, proceeded on the track the recusal had laid for it, under the deputy chief of operations, and it proceeded the way such inquiries do when no hand is on the scale in either direction: slowly, and on paper. Rahman gave his statement in a recorded interview and gave it whole: the call as dispatched, the curb, the unopened folder, the radio request, the answer, the mother's voice on the speaker — a city employee, he said; I did not know; I want that in the record, that I did not know — and his walk to the gatehouse, and the camera, and the release, and the sergeant's callback, which he described with a thoroughness that did the sergeant no favors and himself no editing. Brunner gave her statement and her notebook, and the notebook's contemporaneous entries — subject seated on arrival, parking lot inside the gate, subject outside it — were received into the file as the kind of evidence investigators dream of and rarely get: notes written before their writer knew they mattered.
The desk sergeant gave his statement last. He said he had taken many such calls. He said the detention had sounded routine — a teenager, no cuffs, no charge, a claim of an appointment that sounded, to a desk man's ear, like the claims desks hear all day. He said he had not dispatched a supervisor because, in his judgment, the situation did not require one, and that the department's policy — here the recording shows a pause of some length — afforded discretion. He said he had not known, when he refused, whose child was on the curb. The interviewers noted the claim and noted also, in the neutral prose of their craft, that the policy did not afford the discretion described; that it required notification, full stop; and that the identity of the child was immaterial to the requirement, which existed for children whose parents could not be anyone. He said he understood that. He said he had been a sergeant for nineteen years. The file recorded that too, without comment, because files are not required to grieve.
At the academy, the newspaper's question — whether the caller had a role touching student files — had been sitting in the inboxes of the board of trustees for eleven hours when the board's chair, a woman whose fortune had built the science building the surgeon had photographed, did the arithmetic that Ferris had declined to do. She asked the head of school, in writing, whether it was true that the chair of the admissions parent committee had reviewed the Diallo file in March, and whether it was true that a memorandum existed from the school's own security director concerning that same volunteer's reports, and whether the head of school proposed that the board learn the answers from the school or from the newspaper. Boards are not sentimental bodies. They are fiduciary ones, and what they cannot abide is not error but sequence — the discovery that they were told last.
Ferris answered the board's chair in person, in the head's office, with the door closed, and she made the defense that her administration had been assembling all spring: context. The committee role was advisory. The minutes were a parent's opinion, entitled to exist. The incidents were misunderstandings, closed in good faith. The memorandum was a staff recommendation she had weighed and found disproportionate. The boy had been offered the scholarship — she said this as if it closed the account — and had accepted it. The board's chair listened to all of it with the attention of a woman reading a financial statement in which the numbers are individually accurate and jointly false, and she asked for the security file to be delivered to the board's executive committee by Monday, complete, including the memorandum and both incident reports and the disposition annotations in the head's own hand.