"Do you think there are other families like ours?" Janice asked. Monica thought of the twenty-eight reports from the federal records room and the two matching destruction certificates. She also thought of how easily an ordinary driver could become a statistic in a quarterly report while his mother sold a car to make rent. "I don't know yet," she answered. "But I'm going to find out one number at a time."
That night she searched the public Silver Pines Police Department announcements for the previous eighteen months. There were fifty-two press releases mentioning armed fugitive arrests or firearms recovered during operations involving the local task force. Some cases had produced federal charges, others had been prosecuted in Halden County, and some contained only brief publicity summaries. Monica copied the names and case identifiers into a notebook and wrote requests for the available charging documents and evidence logs. She refused to let the first two matches become a conclusion about every file until she had checked the rest.
The county court provided the requested records over nearly two weeks. Some packets arrived by email, others by post, and a few required another trip to the courthouse because the older entries had not been digitized. Monica paid copying fees, signed receipts, and kept a running index of what she had received. She did not post accusations online or ask reporters to publish her suspicions. Every new page increased the weight of what she might eventually have to say, and she wanted the evidence to carry that weight rather than her own reputation.
On the Thursday the last packet arrived, she cleared her kitchen table. She arranged all fifty-two case files chronologically from the oldest to the newest, set the 2023 destruction certificate on one side and the 2024 certificate on the other, and uncapped a green pen. When Ralph arrived at seven, carrying a thermos and his reading glasses, she gave him a stack of cases and explained the job. He would read the serial numbers from the evidence logs, and she would compare them line by line with the destruction certificates.
The first several cases produced no match. They checked the serial markings twice where the handwriting was faint and set aside any file whose numbering was incomplete. Ralph read aloud while Monica moved her finger down the certificates, murmuring dates and turning pages. Outside the kitchen window, the street grew quiet, lights coming on and going out as families went to bed. At nine they had reviewed fourteen files without adding another confirmed match.
Ralph suggested they might have found an isolated error repeated in only two cases. Monica said that was possible and asked him to keep reading. In the next file, dated August of the previous year, an evidence entry identified a pistol with serial number DX92055. She found the same sequence on the 2024 destruction list with a date in February, long before the August arrest. Ralph took off his glasses and looked at her over the rim of his coffee cup.