Felicia found an odd entry in the evidence inventory. The money was listed as recovered at eight forty-six in the evening, but the radio record showed the first officer did not report arriving at the store until after nine. It could have been an ordinary clerical error. Then Elaine Pruitt located a retired dispatcher's handwritten shift log preserved among personnel records the department had once labeled obsolete. The log showed Sloan requesting authorization to enter the store well after the evidence had supposedly been found.
Another problem appeared in the county's original accounting. The nine thousand dollars alleged to be missing had been treated as a theft before the county treasurer completed a reconciliation of the fund. An independent accountant working with Felicia found transactions that had been entered under the wrong month, and those corrections reduced the supposed shortage substantially. The prosecution at Walter's trial had not disclosed the later reconciliation to the defense, though the county files showed it had been completed before sentencing.
Elias sat at his dining table in Atlanta with the papers spread before him. Mara made tea and placed a cup beside his hand, then returned to the kitchen without asking whether he wanted to talk. She had learned that the moments when Elias finally had something to say were not always the moments when he looked ready to speak. When he called her back, his voice was so quiet she had to sit beside him to hear.
"There was a ledger," he said. "Dad kept saying they never showed the jury the real ledger. I thought he meant his own books. He meant the county's."
Mara looked at the photographs of the old pages. "Does this prove it?"
"Not by itself. But it proves the story they told wasn't complete, and that somebody knew it wasn't complete."
It was more than Elias had ever held in his hands. He went to bed that night exhausted rather than excited, because each newly discovered fact made him think of the four years Walter spent behind prison walls while officials had access to records that might have helped him. He tried not to count the birthdays, the illnesses, and the ordinary evenings his father had missed. He failed.
Felicia eventually located a retired deputy who had testified only briefly at the original trial. The man, now living quietly in a different state, had been reluctant to speak for years because he believed the case was too old to matter. When shown the dispatch record and the revised county ledger, he admitted that the search team had been told in advance where the cash would supposedly be found. He could not claim to have seen Sloan place money in the cabinet, but he described instructions that made the official discovery account impossible to accept at face value.
The statement was taken under oath and corroborated where possible. Felicia added it to a petition seeking relief from Walter's conviction, along with the accounting discrepancies, evidence records, and notes from Odessa's tin. She also documented the pattern of intimidation surrounding Walter's refusal to pay Sloan. The petition did not ask a judge to accept the whole story as a matter of sympathy. It asked the court to examine concrete inconsistencies that the original jury had never been permitted to consider.