“Could be a truck depot, a rail siding, a private parcel. The code was used for only eleven shipments, all within a six-month period.”
“Where did they start?” Thomas asked.
“Three plants. One in West Virginia, one in Ohio, and one outside Briar Glen.”
“And where did they end?”
Naomi looked down at something off-screen. “That's the problem. In the official records, they ended nowhere.”
They met the following morning in a conference room at the county courthouse. The room smelled of old paper and lemon polish. A clerk brought out the shipping ledgers under a chain-of-custody form, and Naomi laid photocopies beside them. Thomas watched her compare the handwritten columns to the electronic summaries. The old records were not neat. Some pages were stained, some numbers had been overwritten, and one ledger contained a coffee ring that obscured a date. But the imperfections were useful. The paper remembered what the database had been instructed to forget.
The transfer code appeared in the margin beside eleven shipments. Each entry included a vehicle number, a driver’s initials, and a time. Four drivers were dead. Two could not be located. One had been identified as a contractor who had moved overseas. The remaining four were names that meant nothing to Thomas.
Naomi tapped the last column. “The destination field was cut away in the archived copy. Not erased. Cut. Someone removed the paper.”
“Can the missing section be reconstructed?” Eli asked.
“Not from this ledger. But the duplicate carbon copy may still exist.”
“Where?”
Naomi turned a page. “A records annex in Columbus. It was transferred there when the company sold its Ohio division.”
Thomas felt the old reflex rise in him: the urgent, almost physical need to leave at once, to follow the next lead before someone could close the door. He stood, then stopped himself.
“What do we need before we go?” he asked.
Eli glanced at him. “A formal request. A preservation notice. And someone who knows how to handle a records archive without turning it into a scene.”
Naomi gave a small smile. “I know a records specialist.”
“Then we do it properly,” Thomas said.
The answer surprised him. Once, he would have taken the first bus and asked questions until somebody threatened to call security. He had mistaken speed for courage because speed was the only thing that made him feel he was still moving. Now he understood that evidence could be lost through impatience as easily as through malice.
The records specialist was named Lila Grant. She had spent twenty-seven years in municipal archives and had the calm, precise manner of a person who believed every document had a history beyond the words printed on it. She agreed to accompany Naomi to Columbus, provided the county issued the request and an investigator documented every box opened.
“I am not a detective,” she told Thomas over the phone. “I am a person who knows how records are supposed to behave. That distinction matters.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
He took the question seriously. “I'm learning.”
They left two days later. Eli drove, Naomi rode in front, and Thomas sat in the back with a notebook on his knees. Walter had insisted on coming as far as the county line, not because he expected to be useful but because he wanted to see his son leave without looking as though he were being taken away.
At the roadside diner where they stopped for lunch, Walter called.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That's not what I asked.”
Thomas looked through the window at the parking lot. A delivery van was backing toward the loading bay. A woman in a red coat was holding the door for a child carrying a paper bag.
“I'm all right enough,” he said.
Walter accepted that. “Your mother used to say there was a difference between being brave and being too stubborn to sit down.”
“I remember.”
“She was usually right.”
“She was.”
“Call tonight.”
“I will.”
When Thomas returned to the table, Naomi had pushed half her sandwich toward him. “You forget to eat when you're thinking.”
“I don't forget.”
“You just postpone it until the rest of us become concerned.”
Eli looked up from his coffee. “That's the definition of forgetting with extra steps.”
Thomas ate the sandwich.
The Columbus annex occupied a low brick building behind a larger administrative complex. Its windows were narrow, its entrance controlled by a keypad, and its loading dock was crowded with plastic bins. Lila Grant met them inside. She wore a gray cardigan and carried a clipboard with a paper inventory sheet clipped beneath a clear cover.