Porter came to the church herself. James met her in the small office beside the sanctuary, where a ceiling fan turned slowly above shelves of donated children's books. He set the worn notebook on the desk between them. Porter did not reach for it until he nodded. Then she opened the cover and read the first page without speaking.
"I've mailed the county copies of some of these pages," James said. "The sheriff's office should have them already."
"We'll check whether they do," Porter replied.
"And if they don't?"
"Then we'll document that, too."
James turned a few pages and stopped at Denise Whitmore's entry. He explained how many nights she had worked to replace the money, how embarrassed she felt having to ask fellow nurses for help, and how the county's denial had affected more than her bank account. He told Porter that people sometimes stopped coming to church after these seizures because they could not bear the questions that followed. Shame belonged to the official who abused them, he said, but somehow the people who lost the money always ended up carrying it.
Porter asked permission to take the notebook into evidence custody temporarily. James agreed after a technician photographed each page and gave him a receipt. For the first time, he watched an official record the provenance of his work as carefully as he had recorded the names of people who came asking for help. When the investigators drove away, he sat in the sanctuary for a long while. He was hopeful enough to be afraid of being hopeful.
Denise gave her formal interview the next morning. She wore clean blue scrubs because she had come directly from another hospital shift, and the room smelled faintly of coffee and printer toner. Porter explained the purpose of the recorded interview, then asked Denise to begin wherever she remembered the encounter starting. Denise began with the weather, because that was what she remembered first: a bright, ordinary day after a night of caring for patients who had needed so much from her.
The description came out in pieces. The traffic lights had been on, her seat belt fastened, the envelope tucked safely in her purse. Hollister had walked toward her car like a man already disappointed by what he expected to find. He spoke to her without ordinary courtesy, asked whether she had anything illegal in the vehicle, and treated every answer as suspicious regardless of its content.
When Denise reached the moment he opened her purse, she stopped and stared at the glass of water on the table. Porter waited. After several seconds, Denise said, "I keep hearing him ask how my mother raised me. I was thirty-two years old. I had just helped someone else's mother breathe through a terrible night. And he was standing there telling me my own mother hadn't raised me properly because he found my money."