That's the deal this county has always offered. Puit didn't move. He just stared at the laptop as if it had betrayed him personally.
Theo pulled the system's deeper audit layer next, the one ordinary users could never edit. The camera entered as active evidence. Toiver's account opened it, then Puit's account did. Then the status changed to damaged equipment. Every edit had a time. Every time had a name.
Soulberg looked at Cara for a long moment. Your notes told us where to look. The system tells us what happened. Keep those two things separate, deputy, and you'll be a good witness. Cara nodded. She didn't trust her voice.
At 3, Wendell Prior came through the side entrance with Leah at his elbow. He wore a cardigan buttoned wrong by one hole and carried the yellow legal pad against his chest. He would only talk to the outside investigators, he said. Soulberg walked out to meet him, and that was when Russell Puit came out of the restroom at the end of the hallway, drying his hands on a paper towel.
The two old men stopped about 10 feet apart. Wendell looked at him for a long time at the silver hair, at the jaw, at the way he stood with his weight on his heel. I know you. I don't believe we've met, sir. Route 9, August 1991.
You were younger. So was I. I don't know this man. Agent, I have no idea what he's talking about.
Puit's face had gone completely blank. Soulberg looked between them. Then she walked back to the evidence table, picked up the surviving index sheet from the black case, the one Puit hadn't known to destroy because it was a list of page numbers and nothing more, and ran her finger down it. Halfway down, she stopped.
Complaint 91-0447, complainant W. Prior, reviewing deputy R. Puit, status closed. The page itself was gone. The line that pointed to it was not.
Wendell sat down slowly on a plastic chair in the hallway. His hands were shaking and he pressed them flat against his knees to make them stop and they didn't. Leah knelt beside him. Lennox came and sat in the chair next to him. He didn't say anything. He just put his hand on the old man's shoulder and left it there.
35 years. I told my wife nobody would ever believe me. She said somebody would someday. She didn't get to see it. Lennox kept his hand where it was. Down the hall, Russell Puit stood alone and watched the two of them, and for the first time in 35 years, nobody in that building moved to stand beside him.
At a few minutes past 4, Puit asked to speak with the sheriff. Soulberg agreed on the condition that she and the tape recorder stayed in the room. He looked older under the fluorescent lights. His white shirt was wrinkled at the sleeves. He talked for a long time about 35 years of complaints, about angry drivers and lying witnesses, and about how no department could function if every supervisor's decision were treated like a crime.