Chapter 10: The Hearing

The conference room at Fox Field has a long oak table and a framed jersey from 1994.

The window looks out at the empty grandstand.

At nine on Tuesday morning it also had about twenty people who were not supposed to be there.

Dani sat at the middle of the table in a blue blazer she'd bought for a cousin's wedding in 2014.

I sat next to her, because I was her one person.

The owner sat at the head.

He was in his seventies, with white hair and a boat-dealer's tan.

He had a bag of peppermints and unwrapped them one at a time without looking.

On his left was a woman from HR with a legal pad.

On his right was the operations director, a man in a quarter-zip who had a laptop open and a slideshow ready.

Along the back wall, shoulder to shoulder, stood the grounds crew and the camera operator.

The kid in the Foxes cap was there, and the broad woman with the sunburn, and four ushers in red vests.

"Those people are not on the agenda," the operations director said.

"They're on their break," said the owner. "Go ahead."

The first slide said INCIDENT TIMELINE.

Dani leaned toward me.

"Slide four is going to be in Comic Sans," she whispered.

It was.

The operations director read in a tired voice.

Item one: two complimentary tickets from the community relations allotment, taken without authorization, face value forty-six dollars.

Item two: an extension of the in-game kiss cam from the standard five seconds to fifteen, in violation of Policy 4.2.

Item three: a directive to camera two to zoom in on a patron's hand without a supervisor's approval.