continued. She could see the logic of a cautious review, but she also saw the danger in giving the same department whose records were challenged the first opportunity to explain them away. She opened her legal pad and wrote beneath the prosecutor's sentence: Find something they can hold in their hands.
On Monday morning, she returned to the federal records room intending to resume scanning the arrest reports. The cardboard box was no longer on her desk, and a yellow note had been stuck to the place where it had stood. SHREDDING PICKUP THURSDAY, it read. Monica carried the note to the office manager behind the glass partition and asked who had requested the files. The manager checked a clipboard and said that Captain Beexley, acting as the local task-force liaison, had requested the return of the box on Friday evening.
"Those records are scheduled for destruction as duplicates," the manager said. Monica pointed out that the files she had been given included original arrest narratives and signatures that were not yet stored in the new system. Some had been scanned, but others had not, and the distinction mattered. The manager offered the weary shrug of someone who handled supply requests, copying jobs, and record transfers all day without expecting any one of them to become a criminal case. "If you want them preserved," she said, "get somebody authorized to put a legal hold on them."
Monica returned to her desk feeling the narrowness of the position she now occupied. She had authority to do ordinary administrative work, but she had stepped aside from supervising the very team whose files had begun to trouble her. She had scanned 206 reports, including the suspicious twenty-eight, and those digital copies were safe in the federal system. The remaining originals, however, could disappear on Thursday if nobody challenged the instruction. She put the yellow note in her folder, wrote down the manager's explanation, and called Harriet's office from her personal phone during her break.
Before Harriet could return the call, the records-room door opened. Copeland entered wearing a black task-force vest over a gray shirt, his badge hanging from a chain around his neck. He lingered in the doorway for a moment, looking first at the two clerks near the copier, then at the office manager, and finally at Monica's bare desk. "Well, there she is," he said. "Heard you've been pulling a lot of paper on my captain."
Monica remained seated and told him she had requested official records relevant to an ongoing legal matter. Copeland stepped closer and picked up the stamped public-records receipt lying beside her keyboard, reading the title aloud as if he had discovered an amusing secret. "Firearm destruction certificates," he said. "You know, somebody might think you're having trouble accepting that you're no longer running this place." Monica told him the records were public and that she had requested them in exactly the same way any resident could.