He had trusted me.

And he had come himself.

I have thought about what it cost him to believe me, because it was not nothing.

Put yourself in his place.

An old friend’s widow calls before dawn and says, in effect: my son-in-law is a respected man with no record, my daughter’s death has already been ruled natural by a doctor, there is no evidence of any crime whatsoever — but my seven-year-old granddaughter, who talks to the dead, felt her mother choking, and I am a nurse and my gut says it’s wrong, so please intervene in a legally closed matter and halt a grieving husband’s funeral arrangements on the strength of a child’s vision and an old woman’s feeling.

Any reasonable officer files that under grief and hangs up gently.