Three years earlier, a church member named Gloria Benton had arrived at his office with a folded traffic citation and an empty bank envelope. She had been stopped for a broken taillight while driving to visit her sister and had lost nine hundred dollars she'd saved for a security deposit. No charges were filed, and the notice she received told her she could petition for a hearing in a county courthouse she could not afford to visit repeatedly. Colton listened, wrote down her name, and promised to make some calls.
The calls led nowhere. A clerk told him it was a law-enforcement matter, the sheriff's office told him it was a civil matter, and the county attorney told him he could not discuss an individual case. Colton began keeping a notebook because each explanation seemed designed to erase the person who had asked the question. He used a blue ballpoint pen, dated every entry, and wrote each victim's words separately from his own observations.
By the second year, the notebook had become too thick to close easily. Its pages held amounts as small as two hundred dollars and as large as ten thousand. Sometimes drivers arrived with bank statements or receipts; sometimes all they had was a trembling recollection of a deputy's voice and the knowledge that they had been unable to pay a bill afterward. Colton did not assume every accusation was accurate, but he believed every person deserved to be heard and every claim deserved to be checked.
He sent three formal letters to Sheriff Coleman and further letters to county commissioners, attaching summaries rather than private financial information. He offered to bring the people involved to a meeting. He asked for an independent review of searches, seizures, and complaints about racial profiling, explaining that Black and Latino travelers appeared disproportionately in the cases he was documenting. Each time, someone acknowledged receipt and assured him the department followed the law.
That was where the response ended. The letters were stamped, filed, and forgotten, at least by the officials who received them. Colton retained copies in a cardboard banker box under his desk, where they sat beside church budgets, winter heating assistance applications, and lists of families who needed food. Sometimes he would take the box out after evening prayers and stare at it, wondering how much proof a small community was expected to accumulate before evidence counted as evidence.
Denise Whitmore became one of the notebook's most painful entries. She was thirty-two, a registered nurse at a county hospital, and the oldest of three sisters who had taken turns caring for their mother after a fall left the older woman unable to live alone. Denise routinely worked twelve-hour overnight shifts, sleeping during the day and delivering groceries to the assisted-living facility on weekends. She was the kind of person who kept a written schedule on the refrigerator because every hour already belonged to somebody.