"Who had this before you?" I asked.
"The complaint unit. Then storage. It was misindexed under the arresting officer's first name. A records analyst found it while auditing unresolved attachments."
"Convenient timing."
"Yes," Velez said. "We're checking that too."
She pushed a disclosure form toward me. I was no longer lead investigator on the historical complaints. Bell would manage those. I could provide a witness statement about the parking lot, and I could help identify family records if my mother agreed. Everything else would have to happen without me in the room.
I wanted to refuse. My father had waited twelve years for someone to ask the right questions, and now that someone was supposed to sit outside.
Lena finally opened her notebook. "If we let your anger make the decisions, Shaw gets to tell a jury this was a family vendetta. Let us take that away from him."
I signed.
Afterward, a medic photographed my neck and checked the tenderness along my collarbone. I gave my statement twice, once uninterrupted and once against the recording. The second version embarrassed me because I could hear how frightened I had sounded. Bell told me fear was not an inconsistency.
At 8:42 that evening, my mother called.
I stepped into the hallway expecting an ordinary complaint about dinner, the kind of call that could make a disastrous day briefly familiar.
"Adrian," she said, "Everett came by."
I gripped the phone. "Is he still there?"
"No. He brought flowers. He said you were having trouble at work."
Through the glass, Lena saw my face and stood.
"Did he ask you for anything?" I said.
My mother paused. "Your father's old notebooks. He said the department wanted to put together a memorial display."
"Mom, don't open the door if he comes back. We're coming to get you."
Her breathing changed. Then she said the thing that turned the whole corridor cold.
"He didn't ask whether I had them, honey. He asked where I'd moved them."
My mother was waiting with her coat buttoned when we arrived. She had put on lipstick, which was how she prepared for hospitals, funerals, and situations in which she refused to look frightened. The flowers Shaw had brought stood unopened in their paper sleeve beside the sink.
"I didn't give him anything," she said before I could speak.
Lena checked the rear door while Bell spoke to the two investigators who would remain outside. My mother watched them with an expression I knew from childhood, the one that meant she was counting practical problems because the emotional ones were too large.
"I have prescriptions upstairs. And the cat won't get into a carrier."
"We'll handle both," I told her.
She touched the bruise rising above my collar. Her hand stayed there for a second. Then she went to get her medicine without asking the question I could see in her eyes.
The notebooks were not in my father's study. They were inside a tin bread box on the highest kitchen shelf, beneath a stack of folded appliance manuals. My mother took them down herself. There were four, their covers softened by use, each one secured with a different rubber band.
"Your father said nobody steals instructions for a broken toaster."
I almost smiled. It hurt unexpectedly.
Bell photographed the box before touching it and explained that he needed her permission to take the notebooks. She listened carefully, asked whether she would receive a copy, then signed the consent form with a steadier hand than mine had been.
The first notebook contained grocery lists, measurements for a porch repair, and dates when my father had worked overtime. The second was almost entirely property numbers. The third had names. The fourth was blank except for a telephone number written inside the back cover.
I recognized one name in the third book: Leon Mercer. Beside it, my father had written, NEVER SAW THE BAG UNTIL THEY HELD IT UP.
Under another entry was a name I did not know: Tessa Ward. There was an address on Alder Street, an arrow pointing toward a date, and a short instruction to himself.
ASK HER ABOUT THE WINDOW.
Bell closed the book when he saw me reading over his shoulder. Not harshly. Just enough to remind me that I was a son in that kitchen, not the person directing the search.
My mother came back with her medicine in a shopping bag. She looked at the notebooks and lowered herself into a chair.
"He stopped sleeping," she said.
No one interrupted.
"The last winter. He would get up at three and sit right here. I thought it was his knees. Sometimes he said a person could count something perfectly and still have the number come out wrong if the person before him had lied."
She looked at me. "I didn't understand."
"Neither did I," I said.
Lena made tea because there was nothing else useful to do while grief caught up with information. We stood around the kitchen drinking it too hot. Outside, a car passed slowly, and all four of us stopped talking until its headlights moved beyond the curtains.
My mother set down her cup. "I won't spend the rest of my life guessing which engine belongs to him."
"You won't," Bell said. "Tonight is a precaution. Tomorrow we make decisions with more information."
He did not promise safety forever. I trusted him more for that.
Before we left, my mother asked for a moment alone in the study. I waited in the doorway while she removed a photograph from the desk: my father standing in our backyard with a ridiculous paper crown on his head. It had been his fiftieth birthday. Shaw was partly visible at the edge of the frame.
My mother folded that edge backward and slipped the picture into her bag.
On the drive to the temporary apartment arranged through the state office, she sat beside me in the back. Streetlights moved across her face. She told me she had never liked the way Shaw called my father stubborn, as if integrity were a little defect his friends patiently endured.