Chapter 78: Under Separate Cover
The evidence custodian for Troop C works in a building with no sign on it, in a business park off Route 9, beside a dialysis clinic.
I know that because I drove Theo there and waited in the truck for fifty-five minutes. I could not go in. Not legally. Practically.
A woman with a homicide conviction walking into an evidence facility and asking about the vehicle in her own case is a story that ends with a phone call to my parole officer.
So I sat in the truck with a notebook on my knee and wrote the three questions in the order he was supposed to ask them.
One. Is there a sealed item associated with incident 22-0339 designated Appendix C. Two. What is its evidence tag number. Three. What is its current status.
Not: can I have it. Never ask a clerk for a thing. Ask a clerk about a record of a thing.
He came out at 3:14 with a piece of paper folded in half lengthwise, which is how you fold something you do not want to look at. He got in and shut the door and did not hand it to me.
“They found it,” he said.
“Say it exactly.”
“Tag 22-0339-11. Item description, quote, CDR download printout and diskette, vehicle electronic data.”
“Diskette.”
“That's what she read out.”
“Status.”
He unfolded the paper. “Purged,” he said. “Date of purge, and then a number, and then the initials D.H.”
I took the paper. It was a printout from an evidence management system, one line of data wrapped across three lines, the way those systems print. The purge date was fourteen months ago. The same week the retention clock ran out on record series 14-7.
Nobody had decided anything. Again.
“So it's gone,” Theo said.
“The state's copy is gone.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being the only thing that's true.”
He looked out the windshield at the dialysis clinic for a while. A woman came out with a man holding her elbow and they got into a car very slowly.
“You know what I keep thinking,” he said.
“No.”
“That everybody who touched this did their job. The trooper did his job. The clerk did her job. The lady who set up the schedule did her job.”
“Yes.”
“And my mother's still dead and you're still the one who did it.”
I let that sit, because it was accurate. Then I said, “There were three copies of that printout.”
“You don't know that.”
“I know how a reconstruction unit works,” I said. “The CDR software prints a report. The trooper prints it once for the file, once for the prosecutor, and once for whoever paid for the tool.”
“Who paid for the tool?”
“In a fatal with civil exposure, the carrier's own reconstructionist asks for a copy.”
“So the insurance company might have it.”
“Might.”
“How do we find out?”
“We ask them,” I said. “And they say no, because we're nobody. And then we spend eight months learning that we are nobody in four separate ways.”
He almost laughed. It was not a laugh. I started the truck.
Then I turned it off again, because I had just understood something and I wanted to be sitting still for it.
“The download isn't the only copy of the data,” I said.
“You just told me it was purged.”
“The printout was purged. The printout is a piece of paper the trooper made from a machine that was plugged into the car.”
He turned in the seat. “The car has it,” he said.
“The module has it. It's a metal box about the size of a paperback, under the console. It holds the record in memory that doesn't need power.”
“For six years?”
“For as long as the chip lasts. It isn't a recording. It's a set of numbers in a table.”
“And nobody wipes it?”
“There's no button,” I said. “You'd have to know it was there, and know what tool reads it, and want to.”
I said all of this evenly. My hands were on the wheel at nine and three, which I had not done on purpose.
“So we need the car,” Theo said.
“We need the car.”
“Which was sold.”
“At a lien auction, by a man named Curtis Dagg who told me to my face he still has the file.”
“And he wouldn't give it to you.”
“No.”
Theo looked at the folded paper in my lap. Then at me. “Family gets things,” he said.
He had not been in the room when Dagg said it. I had never repeated it to him. He had worked it out on his own, in fifty-five minutes, standing at a counter, being told no in a polite voice by a woman with a lanyard.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then let's go now.”
“It's a hundred and ten miles and I'm signed in at seven.”
He said, “Saturday.” I said, “Saturday.”