Chapter 21: The Report
The incident report is nine pages.
It was written by a deputy named R. Corcoran. Badge number in the header, unit number in the header.
I want to say up front that it is a good report.
I have read a great many bad ones since. Reports that guess. Reports that use the word obviously.
Reports where you can hear the man's opinion sitting on top of the facts like a coat on a chair.
Corcoran's is not one of those.
It is flat, it is in order, and it stays inside what he saw.
Dispatch received the call at 11:56 p.m.
Caller was a driver southbound on Corvin Road who stopped at the scene.
Not a witness to the collision. He came along after, and estimated four to five minutes after.
Corcoran arrived at 12:07 a.m. Medical arrived at 12:09. The times appear in three separate places in that report and they agree in all three.
Nadine Okoro was pronounced at 12:41.
Corvin Road at that stretch is two lanes, no center barrier, no streetlights, posted forty-five.
There is a painted fog line on the right side.
Outside it there is a paved shoulder, between two and three feet wide depending where you measure.
She was riding on the shoulder, northbound, going home from the residential facility on Barrow Street where her shift ended at 11:30.
The bicycle was a step-through frame, dark green.
It had a white front lamp, battery type.
And a red rear lamp, battery type, mounted on the seat post.
Corcoran wrote that both lamps were found in the on position and functioning.
I read that sentence three times.
Then I put the pencil down and sat with my hands flat on the vinyl for a while.
Both lamps on. Functioning.
She did everything.
That is what that line says, and it says it in eight words with no editorial in it at all.
She wore a helmet. There is a separate line on the form for that, with a box, and the box is checked.
She had a reflective band on her right ankle, which is a thing you buy for four dollars and which nobody buys.
The vehicle is described as a silver pickup, extended cab, registered to Dean Mercer.
Not my car.
My car was in a garage on Vine Street under a cover that October, which is the one thing anybody ever told me about it that turned out to be true.
The point of impact is on the diagram, marked with an X.
The scene diagram is hand-drawn on a printed grid form, and Corcoran drew it well.
Scale noted, north arrow, measurements to two fixed points: a culvert headwall and a utility pole numbered on its tag.
Tire marks begin one hundred and eleven feet before the X.
They cross the fog line at a shallow angle. The report gives the angle. The report gives everything.
The vehicle came to rest two hundred and six feet past the point of impact, off the shoulder, at the edge of a soybean field.
The bicycle was recovered forty-one feet from the point of impact.
Nadine Okoro was recovered fifty-eight feet from the point of impact.
I read those two numbers and then I read the next paragraph, and then I went back and read those two numbers again.
That is the only part of the whole file where I lost the thread of what I was doing.
Not because it was unbearable. I want to be careful with that word.
It was bearable. I bore it. I was sitting at a card table and I kept sitting there.
It is because forty-one and fifty-eight are numbers, and numbers are the language I have, and for about a minute those two would not go back to being numbers.
Then they did.
Page six is the vehicle examination summary and it is one page, which surprised me even then.
Brakes functional. Steering functional. Headlamps functional. Tires within tolerance. No mechanical defect identified.
One page.
Signed by a technician whose name is printed in block capitals and whose signature is a single sloped line.
I have since learned what else that truck could have told anybody who asked it. It is a long list.
Nobody asked it. There was no reason to ask it. There is never a reason to examine a vehicle in a case where somebody has already said they were driving it.
Page seven is the occupant section.
Driver: identified as Cass Mercer, thirty-two, no — I am doing that from memory and I am doing it wrong. Twenty-four. It says twenty-four.
Passenger: Dean Mercer, twenty-eight.
Both occupants transported and evaluated. Neither admitted. Passenger treated for a laceration to the right forearm.
Page eight is the chemical test narrative, times and custody, and page nine is the continuation sheet listing the property recovered.
Then I turned the page, and the next twenty-two pages were the photographs.