Chapter 9 — THE MAN THEY DECIDED IT WAS
The inspection passed.
I want that on the record because it is the most obscene single fact in this entire account.
Deb Ancrum's report for 118 Delacroix Street, dated Tuesday the ninth, is in the county system and it is marked SATISFACTORY, and the reason it is marked satisfactory is that she never finished it.
She was on the phone to dispatch at seven thirty-four and she never got past the front of house, and under county procedure an inspection terminated for a medical emergency is closed out on the observations completed.
Nine categories checked.
All compliant.
The walk-in freezer temperature column has a dash in it.
Gus Praeger was arrested on the Friday.
Neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury, which in Indiana is a Level 3 felony, plus falsification of a public health record.
The probable cause affidavit ran to six pages and I have read it perhaps forty times and there is nothing untrue in it.
Every fact in it is a fact.
It says he removed the shelving from a walk-in freezer.
It says he permitted two children under six to sleep in that compartment for a period of approximately four months.
It says the temperature log bore his initials on entries recorded while the unit was not in operation.
It says that on the morning of the ninth, with knowledge that a child was inside, he physically obstructed the door and instructed an employee not to open it.
Every one of those is true.
Not one of them is what happened.
The story went out on a Sunday and by Wednesday it was in London.
*Bakery owner blocked door as boy froze.*
There was a version with the security still of his face and there was a version with the flour handprints and there was a version, and this is the one that did the most damage, that used seven seconds of the footage — the paper sack leaving his hand, the child on the tile, his mouth forming *get out* — with no sound.
Somebody put a brick through the front window on the Thursday.
Somebody else, and this is a thing I still do not understand about people, left a bunch of grocery-store carnations on the step underneath the broken glass.
Gus did not make bail for six weeks because the bail was set at a number a man with a bakery two payments from the bank does not have.
Ren was interviewed twice by the Department of Child Services and once by the sheriff.
Nora and Sam went to their grandmother in Terre Haute on a safety plan.
And I gave a statement on the Wednesday, in a room at the county building, to a detective named Marcus Teale, and it was four pages long, and it was completely accurate, and it left out one thing.
I did not tell him that I had been in that building at three minutes past eleven on Monday night and heard the compressor running.
He did not ask.
I have gone over this in my head at three in the morning for years: he did not ask, and I have never once been able to make that matter.