His public defender had been kind but overloaded with cases. The prosecutor had a gun, two police statements, and a warrant record that took time to correct, while Cory had a family that could not afford prolonged hearings and bail expenses. He was warned about the risk of a much longer sentence if he lost at trial. After a long series of hearings and continuances, he eventually accepted a plea arrangement the following year that carried an eighteen-month custodial term, a choice he described without pride and without accusing his lawyer of indifference.
"I kept telling myself I'd get out and go back to work," he said. "Then everybody started calling me a felon, like that's all I was ever going to be." Monica asked whether Copeland had said anything unusual during the arrest. Cory stared at the telephone cradle for several seconds and then remembered a remark the sergeant made as the patrol car door closed. He had protested that the gun was not his, and Copeland told him, "Nobody misses a gun that doesn't exist."
The words were not identical to the ones Monica had heard in the records room, but the meaning was too close to ignore. She asked Cory to say them again, slowly, and he did. When she asked whether he had been the person sending anonymous messages, he shook his head so hard that his chair scraped the floor. He said his mother was nearly his only visitor and that he had no idea how to contact Monica. Then he mentioned that someone had recently sent him a paperback explaining Colorado public-records procedures, without a name or note inside.
Monica asked for his case number, and he recited all twelve digits without hesitation. The jail had required her to leave her bag in a locker, so she used the pen attached to the visiting counter to write the number across the palm of her left hand. Cory stared through the glass and asked what she intended to do with it. "Read the file," she said. "The whole file, not just the part somebody tells me matters."
Across the street from the jail stood the Halden County Courthouse. The clerk at the public records window was an older man wearing a bow tie, and he gave Monica a curious look when she presented a hand covered in ink instead of a written request. She explained where the number came from, and he helped her locate the publicly available case record. Twenty minutes later she sat on a hallway bench with the charging documents, the plea record, and the evidence log spread across her knees. Copeland had signed the arrest narrative, and Fowler was listed as the recovering officer.
The firearm entry contained a complete serial number. Monica opened the 2023 destruction certificate and checked the list carefully, once from the top of the page and once from the bottom. The serial number appeared at line forty-seven with a destruction date months before Cory's arrest, certified under Beexley's signature. For a long time, she sat with the two papers side by side, feeling the cold courthouse bench through her trousers. There were now two unrelated drivers, two recovered guns, and two certificates declaring those same serial numbers destroyed before the alleged discoveries.