I took the board, wrapped it in a dry shop towel, and went inside to shower.
At eight-thirty, the county courthouse basement was already humming with the dull, mechanical noise of municipal machinery.
Radiators clanked in the corners, smelling of scalded paint and dust. Down the narrow linoleum hallway outside the grand jury hearing room, the district maintenance supervisors stood in a tight, silent cluster near the vending machines. They wore their clean canvas jackets and stiff denim, their hands shoved deep into their pockets. When I stepped off the elevator with my canvas teaching satchel over my shoulder, their conversation stopped completely.
None of them looked at me. They looked at the floor, at the water cooler, at the framed aerial photographs of the 1974 county reservoir construction hanging along the wall.
Two doors down, outside Room 104, Mercer was sitting on a wooden bench. He was in uniform, his campaign cover resting on his knees, his hands folded across the stiff brim. The leather strap on his holster had been fastened tight again. He looked up as I approached, his face drawn gray with fatigue.
"Mr. Cole," he said, rising partway before catching himself and settling back onto the bench.
"You sleep at all, Mercer?" I asked, stopping two paces away.
"Shift ended at six," he said quietly. His voice was flat, carrying the dry rattle of a man who had spent three hours dictating incident reports into a recorded precinct ledger. "Lieutenant Miller impounded my dash camera memory card before I clocked out. He had the state investigator pull Vance’s cruiser logs from the last six months."
"And your brother?"
Mercer looked away, staring down the corridor toward the fire exit. "They found eighteen pallet tags from the county salt depot in his pickup truck bed. He was meeting Pete’s driver at the pump shed twice a week to sign off on false distribution manifests. The road department billed the township four hundred dollars a ton for material that never left the yard."
He paused, his jaw working as he swallowed down something hard and bitter. "They offered him a deferred misdemeanor if he testifies before the board about who gave him the gate keys."
"Who gave him the keys, Mercer?"
"Vance," Mercer said. He didn't flinch when he said the name. "Vance’s uncle set the inventory limits ten years ago. It’s been running since before we were in high school."
The heavy oak door to Room 104 opened with a sharp, pneumatic click.
A clerk in a gray wool skirt leaned out, holding a yellow legal pad with four names penciled across the top. "Witnesses for the special inquiry into municipal asset maintenance. Cole. Mercer."
We walked in together.
The hearing room was narrow, paneled in dark, water-stained walnut that had absorbed seventy years of cigar smoke and legal dust. At the center of the green-felt conference table sat the county prosecutor, a thin, sharp-featured man named Danforth, flanked by two field investigators from the state attorney general’s regional fraud division.
Vance sat at the far end of the table.
He was not in uniform. He wore an ill-fitting gray suit that smelled of cedar shavings and mothballs, his collar pinching his thick neck until his skin bulged red over the band. His service weapon was gone; his hands lay flat on the felt table, motionless except for the rhythmic twitch of his right index finger. Beside him sat a private attorney with a heavy leather briefcase and the distracted, irritated posture of a man who had been woken up by an emergency retainer call at four in the morning.
Across from Vance, sitting stiffly with an unopened file folder, was Superintendent Henderson. The superintendent had been in charge of our school district for twelve years; he was a man who measured his career by bond approvals and clean audit certifications. He looked at me as I took the wooden chair beside the court reporter, his mouth tight, his eyes flicking nervously toward the state investigators.
Danforth adjusted his glasses and tapped the microphone on the table. "For the record. This is an administrative inquiry into missing municipal calibration assets and unauthorized surveillance conduct on County Route 9. Deputy Vance has submitted a statement requesting administrative dismissal of all charges, citing field confusion during an active safety interdiction."
Vance’s attorney leaned forward immediately. "My client was acting under the good-faith belief that state-regulated diagnostic modules had been removed from the municipal garage. Any vehicle damage sustained during the traffic stop was incidental to securing what appeared to be an active safety hazard."
Danforth didn't look at the attorney. He turned his eyes toward me.