Pearl is a civilian records clerk.

She has no police training whatsoever.

She has four grandchildren.

She got two blankets, and she put the kettle on, which was completely useless and exactly right, and she sat down on the floor with them, and she did not ask a single question about what had happened.

What she did was talk about the vending machine.

For eleven minutes, Pearl Achebe talked to two frightened children about how the vending machine in that break room had been eating dollars since 2019, and how everybody in the building had a theory, and how the man who came to fix it had said there was nothing wrong with it, and how Sergeant Reyes had once shaken it so hard that a light fell off the wall.