THERE WAS A PROCEDURE FOR HANDLING SUCH CALLS. VERBAL threats were to be documented using the Suspicious Caller Report.
* * *
Date and time of call: ____________
Duration: ___________
Did the caller make a specific threat? Check all that apply:
Shooting___ Explosive device___ Fire___ Sexual assault___ Other threat （please specify）：______
How did the caller sound? Check all that apply:
Male___ Female___ Indeterminate gender___
Young___ Elderly___
White___ Black___ Hispanic___
Angry___ Weeping___ Laughing___ Agitated___ Calm___
Slow talker___ Fast talker___ Stutter___ Lisp___
Other speech impediment （please specify）：__________
Foreign or regional accent （please specify）：________
* * *
The Suspicious Caller Report was unpopular with the staff. When the former Green Beret introduced it during Threat Response Training, he was severely interrogated by one of the volunteers, Marisol Leon.
Sir, I have a question. Do I sound Black or Hispanic?
He smiled uneasily. Ma’am, that’s not for me to say.
Well, this form is asking us to make a judgment. “How did the caller sound?” I’m merely asking you that same question. Do I sound Black or Hispanic?
The Green Beret blushed a shade not found in nature. The Suspicious Caller Report was designed, he explained, to give law enforcement as much actionable intel as possible. There was no other agenda.
Marisol repeated her question.
Ma’am, he said, I’m not going to engage with you on this.
THE DELI WAS PACKED AT MIDDAY, HUNGRY PEOPLE LURKING IN the vestibule. The overflow crowd spilled onto the sidewalk: elderly couples, women pushing strollers, loud-talking men in suits. All day long the place smelled of breakfast, bacon and coffee and fried potatoes. Every few months, Phil dragged Claudia there for lunch. As far as she could recall, he was the only person who’d ever cared what she ate. When they were married, it drove her crazy. After their divorce, it was the thing she missed the most. He’d been her college boyfriend, first lover, starter husband. His mother got her the job at Damsel. They married the summer after graduation and lasted two years.
She was a divorced person. It was her natural state—preferable, she felt, to either alternative. Marriage didn’t appeal to her in any way, and yet she was glad to have tried it. If she were forty-three and never married, she might attach undue importance to the fact. Her never-marriedness would seem the root of all sorrow, the cause of every small dissatisfaction in her fortunate and mostly happy life.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said as they waited for a table. “The phone rang just as I was leaving. It got complicated.” She explained about the Suspicious Caller Report, the angry husband. My wife has been calling this numbah.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Phil said. “Be careful.”
“What would careful look like?”
It was an honest question. At the clinic they took every precaution imaginable. She felt incapable of greater care.
“I’m serious, Claudia. What are you going to do if he shows up there?”
“He won’t. People say things on the phone that they’d never say to your face. Honestly, it was nothing.”
“You said that last time.”
“Last time was also nothing.”
“If I were you,” Phil said, “I’d get myself a gun.”