It arrived in a plain envelope with no return address. The postcard showed a faded photograph of a railway station. On the back, someone had written:
The last ledger was never at the annex. Ask the woman who kept the keys.
Walter brought it to Thomas without comment.
“Do you know who sent it?” Thomas asked.
“No.”
“Have you seen the handwriting?”
“No.”
The message was short, but it changed the direction of the records search. Naomi compared the wording with the earlier letter and found no reliable match. The card's postmark came from a town near the old Vale regional office. The phrase “the woman who kept the keys” could refer to a records clerk, a building manager, or someone responsible for a storage facility.
They began with the old office directory. A facilities list from 2004 named a custodian, Ruth Calder, who had been responsible for the basement records room. Ruth was alive and living in a retirement community outside the city. She agreed to speak after Naomi sent a copy of the postcard and explained that no one was accusing her of wrongdoing.
Ruth remembered the office. She remembered the basement room, the shelves, and the cabinets that had been moved during a renovation. She also remembered a locked storage closet that was not included in the regular inventory.
“Who had the key?” Naomi asked.
“I did. And the facilities manager. Sometimes the regional administrator.”
“What was stored there?”
“Old files. Equipment manuals. Things people didn't want in the main archive.”
“Do you remember a ledger?”
Ruth looked down at her hands. “There was a book with a green cover. Heavy. It was brought down by two men from the regional office. They told me it was a temporary record and that I wasn't to put it in the inventory.”
“Do you remember when?”
“Near the end. Maybe 2004. I remember because the basement flooded the following spring.”
“Was the ledger moved before the flood?”
“I don't know. The closet was locked when I left on Friday. When I came back on Monday, the shelf was empty.”
“Did you report it?”
“I told the facilities manager. He said the regional office had collected it.”
“Who was the facilities manager?”
“Arthur Bell.”
Thomas felt his attention sharpen, though the name was not familiar.
Naomi asked whether Ruth had kept any records of the closet. Ruth said she had kept a small notebook of maintenance calls because the office frequently disputed her hours. She offered to look for it.
Three days later, she called back. The notebook contained an entry dated the week the shelf was emptied: “Green book removed by A.B., witnessed by R.C., regional instruction.” Beside it was a reference number that did not match any item in the main archive.
The reference number led to a storage invoice paid by the Vale regional office. The invoice named a commercial records facility that had since been acquired by another company. The facility's retention system showed a sealed container under an old customer code, but the contents were not listed.
The prosecutor obtained a preservation order. The facility located the container in an off-site warehouse. Its seal had been replaced during a move, but the original inventory tag remained attached. A representative of the facility, the prosecutor, and an independent records examiner opened it together.
Inside were maintenance manuals, payroll binders, correspondence, and a green ledger.
The ledger contained handwritten entries for shipments and internal transfers. It was not a complete record. Some pages had been removed, and several entries used abbreviations that required interpretation. But it included the eleven M-17 shipments, along with three additional transfers to a code that had not appeared in the other manifests.
The three transfers had been made through a separate contractor. Their destination field contained a parcel reference near the old Vale plant in West Virginia.
Naomi read the entries twice. “This is a new site.”
Eli looked at the date range. “And it was not in the environmental report.”
The ledger did not prove what had happened at the parcel. It established that the company had recorded additional transfers outside the reporting system. The prosecutor added the parcel to the investigation, and the state environmental unit began a preliminary records review before deciding whether to seek access.
Thomas looked at the green cover. “This is what the postcard meant.”
“Probably,” Naomi said. “But we still don't know who sent it.”
“Ruth?”
“She says she didn't. And she has no reason to lie that I can see, but we don't assume.”