Chapter 4 — THE PARKING GARAGE
The parking structure on Fourth is municipal and has fourteen cameras and eleven of them work.
That sentence took a state investigator nine days to establish and it is the single most important sentence in this entire account, and I want to be honest that neither of the children knew it and neither did I.
The boys did not save this case.
I want that on the record early because the version that went around Cadmus Falls afterward has a homeless kid producing a recording in a restaurant like something out of a film, and it is not what happened, and the real thing is less satisfying and more important.
Nick had a phone. It was three years old with a spidered screen and no service, and he used it for the camera and for the clock.
He did not record anything in that garage.
He was busy being hit.
What he had on that phone — the only thing on it that mattered, and it did not matter for eleven days — was a photograph he had taken in July of a laminated staff roster on a wall.
I will come back to that.
What happened in the garage happened at 11:04 p.m. on a Wednesday, and it happened under camera nine, and the reason it happened at all was a phone.
Thomas had taken his father's phone.
Not stolen. Daniel had left it on the kitchen island charging and had gone up to shower, and a message came in, and Thomas — twelve, curious, not looking for anything — turned it face up.
I have asked him about a hundred times what he expected to see, and he says he does not know, and I believe him. He is twelve. He turned a phone face up.
What he saw was a message from a woman.
That is what he told me in Bellamy's, and that is what I believed for eleven days: that my husband was having an affair, that our son had found it, and that Daniel had beaten him in a parking garage over it.
That is a coherent story.
It is even a story I could have prosecuted a divorce with.
It is not what happened, and the reason I got it wrong is that Thomas told me about the message and did not tell me about the attachment, because the attachment was a spreadsheet and he was twelve and a spreadsheet did not seem like the interesting part.