Chapter 87: Eight To Ten Days
Anneke Sirko did not call on Thursday.
She did not call on Friday.
On Saturday I walked the fifty-two minutes to the payphone outside the pharmacy and called her shop and got a machine, and I did not leave a message, because a message is a record and I did not know yet what I wanted on the record. It cost me fifty cents, and I got the fifty cents back, because the call never reached a person.
On Monday, at 11:20 in the morning, the office phone rang and Marisol answered it and held the receiver against her collarbone and said, “It's for you, and it's a woman, and she says she'll wait.”
I took it standing up.
“Cass Mercer.”
“It's Sirko.”
“Yes.”
“I read the module on Thursday.”
I did not say anything.
“I've been sitting on it for four days because I wanted to run it twice and then have somebody else look at the second run.”
“Who looked at it.”
“A man I trained under. Twenty-nine years, retired out of a reconstruction unit in another state. I paid him myself. He doesn't know whose case it is.”
“Why.”
There was a pause on the line of about three seconds.
“Because if I'm going to hand a woman a piece of paper that does what this piece of paper does,” she said, “I'm going to be certain.”
I put my left hand flat on the counter.
“Read it to me.”
“No.”
“Ms. Sirko—”
“No,” she said again, not unkindly. “Not on a phone. You come here, you sit down, and I put it in front of you in order, and I explain each line before you see the next one.”
“That'll take an hour.”
“It'll take two.”
“I can't take two hours off in the middle of a—”
Marisol, from her office, without looking up: “Yes, you can.”
Sirko said, “Bring the boy.”
“His name is Theo.”
“Bring Theo. And don't drive yourself.”
I said, “Why not.”
And she said, “Because I've done this eleven times and four of them shouldn't have driven home.”
Her shop is in a converted machine works forty miles east. It has two bays, a bench, and an office with a laminate table and four chairs and a whiteboard that had somebody else's numbers on it, half wiped. There was a radio on the bench playing at a volume just under audible.
We got there on Wednesday at 2 p.m. Theo drove the red hatchback with the broken wiper.
It rained the whole way and he had to lean forward to see, and neither of us spoke for the last twenty miles. I counted eleven trucks and then stopped counting, which I do not do.
Sirko had the module on the bench in a plastic tray, out of its bags, with a numbered evidence tag through the connector.
On the table were three things.
A blue folder. A brown envelope. And a laptop, closed.
She sat down opposite us and put both hands on the table.
“Before anything,” she said. “The download is good. Full deployment record, no corruption, no partials. It's the cleanest six-year-old read I've done.”
“Understood.”
“Second. Everything I'm about to show you is data from a machine. It doesn't know anybody's name. It doesn't have a theory. It's a table.”
“Understood.”
“Third.” She looked at Theo, not at me. “You should decide now whether you want to be in the room.”
Theo said, “I'm in the room.”
“All right.”
She opened the blue folder and did not turn it around yet.
“I'm going to do this in the order I do it for insurers,” she said. “Speed, brake, throttle. Then restraints. Then seat. Then I'll tell you what I think and you can throw that part away, because what I think isn't evidence.”
She turned the first page around.
Five seconds before impact. Ten rows, half a second apart.
Vehicle speed: 44, 44, 45, 45, 46, 46, 45, 43, 39, 31 miles per hour.
Throttle: 18 percent, 18, 20, 21, 22, 22, 0, 0, 0, 0.
Service brake: off, off, off, off, off, off, ON, ON, ON, ON.
“She braked,” Theo said.
Sirko did not correct the pronoun. She had not been given a pronoun. I noticed that at the time, in the way you notice a nail in a board before you understand you are going to stand on it.
“The driver came off throttle and onto brake about one and a half seconds before impact,” she said. “That's roughly a normal reaction time from first sight of a hazard. Whoever was driving saw her.”
Theo put both hands over his mouth and kept them there.
“Speed at impact, thirty-one,” Sirko said. “Limit on that road is thirty-five. Nobody was racing. Whoever it was, they were driving like a person.”
She turned the page.
“Now the restraints.”