Chapter 76: Nine Items
Marisol looked at him over the counter for about two seconds and then looked at me.
“This the boy,” she said.
“Theo Okoro,” I said.
“Marisol Vega. I write bonds.” She put her hand out and he shook it. “You want coffee, it's terrible.”
“I'm fine.”
She went back into her office and shut the door most of the way, which is her version of leaving the room. Theo put the index card on the counter. It had been folded twice and had a ring on it from a glass.
“I looked you up again,” he said. “Properly this time.”
“All right.”
“There's a woman driving your car.”
I did not say anything.
“Blue estate. Sticker on the back window, one of those university parking things, it's mostly peeled.” He watched my face while he said it. “I sat outside the address for an hour. She came out and got in it and drove to a grocery store.”
“That's my cousin.”
“I know who she is. She's got your last name now.”
“She has my husband's last name,” I said. “Which was mine.”
He nodded slowly, like a man filing something.
“I'm not doing this for you,” he said.
“You told me that in December.”
“I'm saying it again because Monday I nearly didn't come.”
“What changed it?”
“The card,” he said. “Nine things. Not one thing. Anybody who wanted to lie to me would have asked for one thing.” I have thought about that sentence a great deal since.
He sat down in the client chair, which is bolted to the floor. We went through the nine items in order and he made me justify each one, and twice I could not, and I struck those two off.
That left seven.
One. The final investigative report, complete, with all appendices, from the District Attorney's file rather than the police file.
Two. The autopsy report and the medical examiner's diagram. Three. The presentence investigation report.
Four. Any photographic evidence log, meaning not the photographs, but the index that lists what photographs exist and their identifiers.
Five. The evidence custody chain for the vehicle. Six. Any accident reconstruction supplement, including anything titled Appendix C.
Seven. The insurance claim correspondence held in the prosecutor's file relating to the vehicle's release from impound.
He stopped on seven.
“Why does the prosecutor have insurance letters?”
“Because a carrier has to be told before a vehicle in a fatal case is released,” I said. “There's usually a one-page letter. It's nothing. It's a formality.”
“Then why ask.”
“Because it names people,” I said. “Letters always name people. That's the only reliable thing about them.”
He wrote something in the margin of the card. I did not read it. Then he asked the question I had been waiting for since Thursday.
“What do you think the file says?”
“I think it says a woman named Cass Mercer was driving,” I said. “I signed a paper saying so. Everything in that file is downstream of the paper.”
“And you didn't do it.”
“No.”
“Then who did.”
And here is where I have to be honest, because I was wrong, and I was wrong in a way that felt like being right.
“My husband,” I said. “Dean. He was drunk. He'd been drunk every Friday for a year. He had two prior stops. He'd have gone away for a long time.”
I said it flatly and completely and without any doubt at all. Theo watched me say it.
“You're sure.”
“I've been sure for six years and eleven months.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the only one I have.”
He stood up. “Then get me the forms,” he said.
I had the forms. I had had them for nine days, in a manila envelope in the bottom drawer of the desk, under the box of toner.
There were four. A victim notification request. A written request for records under Article 24. A designation of representative, which was the one that mattered, because it let him name a person to receive documents on his behalf.
He filled in his name and address in block capitals, with a pen from the cup on the counter. Then he got to the designation and stopped.
“This puts your name on it.”
“Yes.”
“So they'll see it.”
“Some of them will,” I said. “Some of them will hand it to a clerk who processes forty a day and doesn't read the second page.”
He held the pen above the line for a long time. Nine or ten seconds. I counted.
“If you're lying to me,” he said, “I want to be the one who finds out.”
“That's fair.”
He signed it.
I watched him do it, and I want to record that I felt no relief at all. I felt the opposite of relief, which does not have a word, and is what you feel when a door opens that you already know has a hallway behind it and not a room.