Bud Harris earns Isaac English’s trust after his confession

Bud Harris earns Isaac English’s trust not through a clean resolution of the case, but through a chain of choices made under legal, personal, and institutional pressure. Harris protects Billy Poe while weighing his duty as a police chief against his own judgment of what is right; Isaac, who once feared that involving the authorities would expose him, eventually returns to tell Harris the truth. Their closing exchange turns trust into a deliberate, uncertain choice rather than a settled guarantee.

A relationship shaped by discretion

Before Isaac makes his confession, Harris has already taken risks around the case. At the crime scene, an anonymous tip has brought him to the body of a man he understands to be transient. When he notices a familiar jacket, he hides it behind a workbench before a state trooper arrives. The jacket belongs to Billy Poe. Harris is less troubled by the act of concealment itself than by what it means to protect someone connected to the death, and he mentally argues both sides of the decision.

Harris frames police work in Buell as a matter not only of enforcing rules but of deciding what doing right requires. His idea of community discretion includes letting some people go rather than treating every offense as a reason for arrest. Yet he also recognizes the danger of using that principle to excuse his defense of Billy. He considers whether he should return to the scene, reveal the jacket, and arrest him, but chooses to wait and see which judgment proves right. That hesitation establishes a pattern Isaac will later encounter directly: Harris does not treat law enforcement as an automatic response, but neither does he regard his own judgment as beyond question.

Protection before confession

Harris’s discretion extends to Isaac and Billy together. When he sees them, he tells another officer they look fine and suggests that they might be given a ride home if they promise to stay out of trouble. Isaac says they can walk, but Harris urges them to take the ride. The encounter is brief, yet it shows Harris choosing a limited, informal intervention instead of escalating the situation into detention.

That choice matters in light of Isaac’s earlier fear of contacting the authorities. After the confrontation at the machine shop, he wants to find a phone and call for help for the injured man. Billy warns that an ambulance would bring the police behind it. Isaac’s concern that calling might identify them makes clear why a later decision to approach Harris cannot be taken for granted. Trust must overcome a concrete expectation that police involvement will expose him.

Harris’s protection is not simply an expression of confidence that the case will disappear. The Buell Police Department is facing a severe budget reduction, from $785,000 to $541,000, with layoffs and reduced training expected. Harris has to make difficult decisions about a small department while a state investigation is also examining misconduct in the town’s government. These pressures do not explain away his choices, but they place them within a strained institution where formal procedure and local judgments of fairness are continually in tension.

Managing Billy’s case

When Harris speaks with Billy, he tells him that Isaac is not yet a suspect because the district attorney does not know who he is, and warns that revealing more could worsen Billy’s position. He urges Billy to explain what happened so the killing can be presented as self-defense, emphasizing the risk of a jury seeing only that Billy killed a man and fled. Billy describes the immediate threat at the machine shop, and Harris accepts that account as relevant to a self-defense case.

Harris then lets Billy go home for the night rather than booking him at once. He tells him to be ready for Harris to pick him up the next day, before the state police do, and instructs him to get rid of his shoes and any receipts. The instruction is a direct intervention in the evidence, not merely a sympathetic conversation. It deepens the moral ambiguity of Harris’s protection: he is trying to help Billy face the case in a way that might support self-defense, while also directing him to destroy potential evidence.

The decision leaves Isaac exposed in a different way. When Billy later tells Lee English what happened, Lee understands that the two men may need lawyers but will not necessarily be on the same side. Helping Billy secure a lawyer could improve Billy’s position while harming Isaac’s. Harris’s choices therefore shape a widening conflict in which loyalty and legal self-protection pull against one another; his eventual conversation with Isaac takes place after that conflict has become impossible to ignore.

The confession and a provisional trust

When Isaac returns to Buell, he asks to speak with Harris and announces that he is turning himself in. He tells Harris that Billy did not kill the homeless man. Harris reacts with alarm and asks him not to say anything else. Isaac insists that he is telling the truth, but Harris initially rejects the statement. The exchange is not a simple welcome or absolution: Harris’s response suggests that he understands how much may follow if Isaac continues.

Harris then explains that Billy has been charged, but that developments in the case now appear likely to require his release. He adds that the authorities have never heard of Isaac, and believes Billy will not identify him, particularly once Billy’s lawyer learns what has changed. Harris says he will contact the lawyer after their meeting. He gives Isaac information that reduces the immediate threat of Billy remaining imprisoned, while also making clear that Isaac’s identity has not entered the official account.

Isaac says he plans to leave Buell and live with his sister in Connecticut. Harris agrees that this is a good idea. Before Isaac goes, Harris tells him he did the right thing by coming in and acknowledges that few people would have done the same. The recognition matters because Isaac has come to confess despite the risk that the truth could implicate him; Harris responds by treating the act as a moral choice, even while advising him to go home.

After leaving the office, Isaac realizes that he has decided to trust Harris, as well as the others. That trust is explicitly a trial: he will see how it turns out. Harris, watching him leave, is not equally certain. He wonders whether he will be able to keep quiet and recognizes that the situation could still become a disaster. Their relation ends in this asymmetry: Isaac chooses trust, while Harris remains conscious of the danger of honoring it. The book leaves the promise unsettled, making the decision to rely on another person—not a guaranteed legal outcome—the defining result of their encounter.