Chapter 86: Appendix B
While we waited I worked on Appendix B, because it was the only thing left I could do sitting down.
Appendix B is the photograph log. It is not photographs. It is a list.
Sixty-one entries. Each entry has four fields: sequence number, description, exposure data, and the initials of the photographer.
The descriptions are written by a trooper standing in the cold at one in the morning, and they read like it.
01. Scene, looking north.
02. Scene, looking south.
03. Bicycle, in situ.
I stopped at 03 for about a minute and then went on, because the alternative was to stop entirely.
11 through 19 were the vehicle at the scene, exterior, eight aspects and one overall.
20 through 26 were the roadway, tire marks, and a yardstick laid in the gutter.
27 through 33 were the vehicle at the impound facility, exterior, in daylight.
34 through 41 were the vehicle at the impound facility, interior.
I read entry 37 four times.
37. DRIVER SEAT, TRACK POSITION, TAPE IN FRAME.
Tape in frame.
That is a photograph of the driver's seat with a tape measure lying in the shot so that the distance can be read later.
That photograph exists. Somebody took it. Somebody thought it was worth taking.
And it was taken in daylight, at the impound facility, before the car was moved again, before the seats were sold, before six years happened.
I put the log down and walked to the window and back, which is eleven feet each way.
Then I sat down and wrote the request.
Photographs are a separate problem from paper.
Paper lives in a file room and goes on the paper schedule.
Digital images live in an evidence management system bought out of a technology grant, and that system has its own retention rule. Ten years, because the vendor set the default at ten and nobody changed it.
Ten years is not up.
The images existed. The question was cost.
The agency charges seventy-five cents per image for reproduction and a fifteen-dollar media fee.
Sixty-one images is $45.75 plus $15, which is $60.75.
I had $21 after Sirko.
Theo paid it. He did not make a thing of it.
He filled in the form and wrote the check from an account with his mother's name still second on it, and told me afterwards, once, in one sentence.
The turnaround was eleven days.
What came back was a disc in a paper sleeve, an index, and a letter saying four images were withheld as depicting the decedent.
Fifty-seven images.
Theo printed them at the library, four to a page, fifteen cents a page, and brought them in the same plastic bag he had used in April.
We laid them out on the folding table with the tablecloth.
I want to say what I did, because this is the part where I nearly ruined it.
I went straight for 37.
That is wrong.
When you have a set of images you go through them in sequence and write down what you see before you decide what you are looking for. If you look for a thing you will find it whether or not it is there.
I know that. I have known it since the certificate course. I did it anyway.
Image 37 was a photograph of the driver's seat of a silver Ford Taurus, taken from the open driver's door, in daylight, with the seat still in the car.
There is a steel tape lying along the floor beside the seat rail, hooked over the front edge of the rail, extended back.
The airbag had deployed and the deflated bag is hanging over the wheel like laundry.
The seat is upright. The head restraint is at its lowest setting.
And the seat is far forward. Not slightly.
Obviously, visibly forward, so far forward that the gap between the seat back and the wheel looks wrong, the way a child's chair looks wrong at a dinner table.
I looked at that for a long time.
Then I said, out loud, in an office with a scanner running, “That's Dean sitting close because he was drunk.”
Theo said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
Here is what I had done. I had a photograph and a conclusion I had held for six years, and I bent the photograph until it fit.
Drunk drivers do sit forward. It is in the literature. It is a real thing.
It is also, in this case, complete garbage. I said it out loud, and Theo heard me, and neither of us knew what it was yet.
I could not read the tape in the print. Four to a page at fifteen cents does not resolve a tape measure.
So I put image 37 in an envelope with the disc, addressed it to Anneke Sirko, and wrote one line on a compliments slip.
“Can you scale this.”
I mailed it on a Tuesday.
Her report on the module was due Thursday.