Chapter 51: The Header
I want to describe the accident report properly, because everything turns on the top four inches of it and most people have never looked at one.
It is a state form, the version in use that year, legal-size, a grid of boxes with two-point rules.
The header runs across the top in a band four inches deep and holds nine fields.
Agency. Agency case number. Local report number. Date of crash. Time of crash. Day of week. Number of vehicles. Number of injured. Number of killed.
Then location fields, then coded boxes for lighting, weather, and roadway surface, then the narrative.
The narrative on ours ran to one and a half pages of ten-point type on a continuation sheet.
Every field has a number beside it in small italic, because the report is keyed into a state database and the numbers are the column headings.
So the form is built to be machine-read, and the fields are filled by a trooper who has to satisfy a computer.
Which means the date fields are not decorative.
I put Exhibit 1 under the lamp on the fourteenth of December.
Agency: State Police, Troop C.
Agency case number: 19-04477.
Local report number: blank, with a diagonal line drawn through it in pen.
Date of crash: 03/11.
Time of crash: 0006.
Day of week: MON.
Number of vehicles: 2.
Number of injured: 0.
Number of killed: 1.
I sat with that for a while, and not for the reason you think.
Number of vehicles: 2.
A car and a bicycle. The form counts a bicycle as a vehicle. There is a code for it in box 34 and the code was entered correctly.
Number of injured: zero. Number of killed: one.
A woman on a green bicycle riding home from a night shift is, in the language of the form, Unit 2, Occupant 1, and a 1 in the killed box.
Her name is on line 3 of the Unit 2 block, last name first, in capitals, in a box one inch high.
OKORO, NADINE A.
Age 41. Female. Employed. Helmet: YES. Reflective clothing: YES. Lighting on unit: YES — FRONT AND REAR, OPERATIONAL AT SCENE.
I read that block eleven times, and then I read it again.
For six years I had been told, by various people including my own attorney, that it was very dark and she was very hard to see.
Box 61 is not a tone. It is a coded field and the trooper had coded it.
I did not have a reaction I can describe. I noted it on the pad under a heading I made that night: THINGS I WAS TOLD THAT THE FILE DOES NOT SAY.
That heading eventually ran to two pages in my own handwriting. It is the most useful thing I have ever written.
Then I went back to the top band and I did what I do with every document that crosses the scanner.
I read the date fields.
Date of crash: 03/11.
Then the second date field, 9b, lower right, which people miss because it sits inside the agency block.
DATE REPORT COMPLETED: 03/11.
Then the trooper's block at the foot of the second page.
Reporting officer: Trooper D. Kessel, badge 4471.
Signature: a fast blue scrawl.
Date signed: 03/11.
Supervisor review stamp: 03/12.
So: crash six minutes past midnight on the eleventh. Report written and signed the eleventh. Reviewed by a sergeant on the twelfth. All of that is normal, and normal is the reason the report is worth anything.
Beside my chart I wrote: REPORT DATE = 03/11. FIRM.
Then I squared the report to the left edge of the desk, put page 118 to the right of it, lined the top edges up, and turned the lamp so it lit both.
And then I did not look at page 118.
I stood up and washed the two coffee cups, emptied the shredder bin, and refilled the scanner tray, which did not need it.
I was thirty-two and I had a certificate in a drawer saying I was qualified to do exactly this, and I stood at a sink washing a cup that was already clean.
I want to be honest about that.
I was not building suspense. I was frightened.
Not of the page. Of what I would be if I read it carefully and it said the ordinary thing.
Because then it would be finished. It would be true, all of it, the six years and the woman on the green bicycle and the son who wrote me letters, and there would be nothing left to check.
Twenty-two months of not reading it had been, it turned out, twenty-two months of keeping a door open.
I came out of the bathroom at 10:40, sat down, and put my finger on the signature line of page 118.
The lamp was on. The two pages were square.