Chapter 84: The Consent
Bernard Kessel wrote back to my second letter in handwriting that leaned hard to the left.
He said the car was in the north corner past the equipment shed.
He said the tree was an ash and had come up through the passenger footwell.
He said he had gone out with a flashlight and looked underneath, and there was a metal box on a bracket with a plug going into it, and it was clean.
He said he did not want my fifty dollars.
Then he said this, and I am copying it exactly because I have the letter in front of me.
“My wife was hit by a car in 1994 and lived. The man who did it never stopped. I have thought about that man every week for thirty years. If somebody had come to my field then and asked me for a bolt out of a car I would have given them the bolt.”
I read that on a Thursday evening on the front step of the halfway house.
Denise came out and told me to move because I was blocking the step. I moved.
Then I sat on the low wall and read it again.
Here is what I did with it, which is the part I am not proud of and will set down anyway.
I did not write back and thank him.
I wrote back and asked him to sign an affidavit.
Because a kind letter is not consent.
If this ever reached a courtroom, a prosecutor would stand up and say the data was obtained without valid authorization from the owner, and every number in it would go in the bin.
So I drafted it. Four paragraphs, one page.
One. That he is the owner of the described vehicle, VIN ending 8802, having purchased it by bill of sale on the twelfth of September, and that no other person claims an interest in it.
Two. That the vehicle has never been registered or titled in his name and has remained on his property continuously since.
Three. That he authorizes a named technician to access and download the contents of the airbag control module, and to remove the module if necessary.
Four. That he makes no claim to the data and consents to its disclosure to any court, agency, or attorney.
I could not notarize it, obviously.
I could not deliver it in person.
And a document that arrives by mail with nobody there to explain it is a document that sits on a kitchen table for five weeks.
So Theo drove.
He does not own a car. He borrowed his supervisor's, a red hatchback with a broken rear wiper.
He drove ninety-four miles on a Sunday and back the same day. It took eleven hours, because he stopped for the notary.
I did not go. That was not fear.
Parole travel outside the county requires written permission. The request form asks the purpose, and there is no line on that form for what I was doing.
I stayed at the halfway house and cleaned the bathroom that eight women share, which nobody asked me to do.
There is a kind of waiting that has to be done with your hands.
He called at 8:40 that night.
“He signed it,” Theo said.
“Did the notary see him sign it, or did he bring it already signed?”
“Cass.”
“Answer the question.”
“The notary watched him,” he said. “I made him do it in front of her. She stamped it and she wrote the date and she wrote her commission number.”
“Good.”
“He gave me a coffee. He asked about my mother. I told him she worked nights at a care home and she rode a bike because our car was bad.”
I did not say anything for a while.
“I saw the car,” Theo said.
“All right.”
“Cass, there's a tree through it. It's like the tree's holding it up. The whole front's just gone, there's nothing, you can see straight through where the engine was.”
“Did you look underneath?”
“I laid down on the ground and I looked underneath with my phone light,” he said. “There's a box. Grey. Two bolts. There's a plug.”
“Is the plug seated?”
“What?”
“Is the plug pushed all the way in, or is it hanging?”
He was quiet for four or five seconds.
“It's in,” he said. “It's got a clip over it. It's in.”
I wrote that down. Grey module, two bolts, connector seated, clip present.
Then I said, “Theo. Thank you.”
He said, “Don't.”
“Why not.”
“Because if that box says what you think it says, you didn't do it,” he said.
“And if you didn't do it, then nobody's done anything for six years, and I've been writing letters to the wrong person since I was sixteen.”
I heard a car door.
“So don't thank me yet,” he said. “Just read the box.”