"Don't post it yet," she told him when she handed the phone back. Ralph asked whether she was worried about getting in trouble, and Monica said that wasn't it. She needed the original file preserved with its metadata, a second copy made somewhere independent, and the people in it allowed no advance warning about what she might have captured. Ralph glanced at her, surprised by the precision of the request. Then he nodded once and said he had spent enough years writing aircraft maintenance records to understand why a date mattered.
At home, Monica washed the gravel from her knee, taped a clean dressing over the scrape, and opened a legal pad at the kitchen table. She wrote the morning down from beginning to end, starting with the time she had shut the driver's door and ending with Edy's verification call. She recorded names, positions, exact phrases, the color of Fowler's cargo pocket, the direction of the police cruiser, the captain's pause over the evidence bag, and the fact that Copeland had not read the report aloud until they were inside the cruiser. In the center of one page, she wrote DX30417 in large capital letters and circled it once.
Across the street at 9:45 that night, Ralph's old kitchen landline rang. His late wife had insisted they keep it when everyone else switched to mobile phones, and almost nobody called anymore except his sister and persistent salesmen. He answered with a weary hello and heard a calm voice he could not readily identify as a man's or a woman's. It gave him exactly one sentence: "Ask her when the crusher last ran." Then the line disconnected.
Ralph tried the number display, but the call had come through without a number. He held the receiver a moment longer, hearing only the faint empty sound of the line. Through his front window, Monica's kitchen light still burned across the street, and he nearly went over to tell her what had happened. Instead he put the phone down, wrote the sentence on the back of an old grocery receipt, and decided she had endured enough questions for one Saturday. He tucked the paper beneath his coffee mug, where he would see it again in the morning.
Monday arrived with a thin frost along the edges of the grass. Monica was awake before five, not because an alarm rang but because the wound on her knee made every attempt to find a comfortable sleeping position a little less successful than the last. She cleaned it under the bathroom light, replaced the dressing, and looked at the faded bruise forming along one wrist where the handcuffs had been tightened. Then she opened the wardrobe and took out the uniform she had not worn since moving from Nebraska. It was the first day she would officially stand before the Front Range Fugitive Task Force as its new supervisor.