Chapter 77: What Came Back
The District Attorney's Office responded in nineteen days. That is not fast. It is inconceivably fast. My own request had taken fifty-one days to produce one sheet of paper.
The difference was one word on a form. Victim.
The package came to Theo's address, because it had to. He brought it to the office in a plastic bag. It weighed, on Marisol's postage scale, four pounds and one ounce.
Two hundred and thirty-eight pages.
We put it on the conference table, which is a folding table with a tablecloth on it because Marisol thinks clients should see a tablecloth.
I did not open it first. I made him open it. Not out of ceremony. Because if this ever went anywhere, somebody was going to ask about the chain of custody of these copies, and the true answer needed to be that the victim's son opened the envelope.
He took the first inch off and set it down. Then he sat with his hands on his knees and said, “You do it. I'll watch.”
I did it.
The first sixty pages were charging documents, arraignment minutes, and the plea colloquy. I could recite them.
Pages 61 to 88 were the autopsy. I turned those face down as I went and did not read them aloud, and he did not ask me to. He read them later, alone, at home, and we have never discussed it.
Pages 89 to 140 were the presentence report. Pages 141 to 202 were the final investigative report of the Crash Reconstruction Unit, Troop C, incident 22-0339.
Sixty-two pages.
The copy the police had offered to sell me for $41.75 was going to be forty-four pages.
I know because the page numbers in the DA's copy were printed by the police in the footer, and they ran 1 through 62, and eighteen of them were marked at the top with a stamp reading NOT FOR DISCLOSURE — WORK PRODUCT.
That stamp is not a legal exemption. It is a rubber stamp somebody bought.
Pages 203 to 238 were correspondence.
I made a list of what the report contained before reading any of it in detail. That is the correct order.
Section 1: scene description and roadway geometry. Section 2: witness statements. Four witnesses. Three saw the vehicle after. One heard it.
Section 3: vehicle damage, exterior. Section 4: vehicle damage, interior.
Section 5: speed analysis, three methods, converging on a range. Section 6: conclusions.
Appendix A: scale diagram, reduced. Appendix B: photograph log, 61 entries, identifiers only.
Appendix C: referenced eleven times in the body of the report.
Not attached.
In its place, at the back, was a printed sheet with a case number and a line of text.
APPENDIX C — VEHICLE ELECTRONIC DATA — RETAINED IN CASE FILE UNDER SEPARATE COVER — SEE EVIDENCE CUSTODIAN.
I read it four times.
Theo said, “What's electronic data.”
“The car's own record of the crash,” I said.
“Cars do that?”
“Since about 2000. Most of them. It's a module. It writes down the last five seconds.”
He was quiet.
“Five seconds of what.”
“Speed. Brake. Throttle. Whether the belts were buckled. When the airbags fired.” I put my hand flat on the sheet. “And on some cars, where the driver's seat was.”
He looked at me.
“Where the seat was,” he repeated.
“How far forward it was on the rail.”
“Why would that be in there?”
“Because the airbag has to know how close the driver is,” I said. “If somebody's sitting very close, the bag can kill them. So the car checks the seat position before it decides how hard to fire.”
I said all of that flatly, in the voice I use for procedure, and I did not understand one single thing about what I had just said. I thought it was a way to prove Dean was driving.
I turned to Section 4, vehicle damage, interior, and I read seven pages, and none of them gave a measurement.
They gave a sentence.
“Driver seat track position noted; see Appendix C.”
Eleven references. Eleven doors, all opening onto the same missing room.
Theo picked up the last thirty-six pages, the correspondence, and started going through them because he wanted a job.
After six minutes he held one up.
“There's a letter here from an insurance company,” he said. “About the car.”
“Read me the names.”
He read four. Three of them were adjusters.
The fourth was the name of the tow yard.
Ardmore Recovery, attention Curtis Dagg, notice of intent to sell.
Dated eleven weeks after the crash.
“They sold it,” Theo said.
“Yes.”
“Then the module's gone.”
“No,” I said. “The module is bolted to the floor of the car. Nobody removes it. Nobody knows it's there.”
I turned the letter around so I could see the plate number, and the plate number was Dean's, and under it was the VIN, all seventeen characters, printed clean.
“The car still exists,” I said. “Somewhere.”