Chapter 85: The North Corner
Anneke Sirko drove a white cargo van with nothing written on it. She arrived at Bernard Kessel's gate at 9:04 on a Saturday morning in July.
I know the time because she wrote it on the first page of her field notes. Those notes are the reason any of this held together later.
I was there.
I had permission. I had asked my parole officer for a travel pass, purpose given as assisting a licensed technician in an inspection of a vehicle in a civil matter.
He signed it without looking up. It took four minutes.
That is the whole system. Fifty-one days for a piece of paper. Four minutes for what mattered.
The field was hay that had not been cut. It came to the middle of my shins and it was wet at nine in the morning.
Kessel walked us out. He is seventy-one and walks with his hands behind his back.
Two hundred and ten paces from the equipment shed. I counted them.
Then the hay stopped and there was the car.
I had not seen it in six years and four months.
I will describe what I did rather than what I felt. What I felt is not admissible.
I stopped walking about fifteen feet short of it.
I put my left hand in my jacket pocket and closed it around my keys. I have done that since prison, to know where my hands are.
I looked at the roofline first, then the B-pillar, then the door aperture, then down.
The front end was gone to the firewall. No hood, no fenders, no headlamps.
Ivey had sold all of it. It is probably still on the road somewhere, in pieces, working.
The windows were out. The doors were off. The rear bench was gone and so were the front seats.
Where the driver's seat had been there were four bare holes with the studs standing up out of them.
The ash tree was about six inches through at the base. It had come up in the passenger footwell and gone out where the windshield was.
There was carpet on the floor. It was grey with dirt. It was the same carpet.
Grass had come up through the driver's footwell too, but the tunnel was clear.
Sirko did not look at any of that.
She walked around the car once, wrote for ninety seconds, and said, “Mr. Kessel, is this your vehicle.”
“It is.”
“Say your full name and today's date, please.”
He said them. She wrote them down. Then she photographed the VIN plate, the bill of sale, the affidavit, my travel pass, and Theo's licence.
Then the four of us standing in the hay, with a timer on a tripod, which I did not understand at the time.
I asked her why.
“Because in about a year,” she said, “somebody will stand up in a room and say a felon and a victim's son went out to a field and did something to a car.”
She put the camera down.
“So there's a photograph of everybody's hands.”
She laid a tarp beside the driver's door aperture and lay down on her back with her head under the sill.
Then she said, “Well.”
Theo said, “Is it there?”
“It's there and it's dry,” she said. “Mouse nest against the bracket, but the connector's sealed. Give me the small light.”
I gave her the small light. My hand was steady. I noted that it was steady, the way you check a gauge.
She was under there for eleven minutes.
When she came out her back was wet through and she had grass in her hair.
She sat up and looked at the car, not at us.
“I can read it here,” she said. “I'd rather take the module.”
“Why.”
“If the connector's corroded and I get a partial, we've had our one shot.”
“Take it,” I said.
“If I take it, chain of custody starts now and it has to be perfect. It goes in a bag with a number and a signature, and it does not leave my possession.”
“Take it.”
She took it.
Two 10-millimeter bolts.
She used a quarter-inch ratchet. It took four minutes and eighteen seconds, and I counted them, because there was nothing else to do.
She put it in an anti-static bag, then a paper bag, and wrote on the paper bag: 22-0339 / VIN …8802 / ACM / KESSEL, and the time, 10:41.
Kessel signed the bag. Theo signed the bag. Sirko signed the bag.
She did not ask me to sign it. I did not offer. Neither of us said a word about why.
Then she said, “I'll have a report in eight to ten days.”
I said, “Ten days.”
“Eight to ten.”
We walked the two hundred and ten paces back through the hay.
Behind us the tree stood up out of the car exactly as it had for six years, and nothing about it had changed at all.