That evening she sat at home with the recovered envelope, the damaged earring, the citation, the seizure forms, and photographs of Harvey's receipt. A judicial complaint could be answered through the established process; the broader pattern on the interstate required a different beginning. She remembered the sentence in Lyman's report: "One open beer bottle recovered from under driver's seat."
It was too smooth. No uncertainty, no description of how he reached it, no distinguishing detail about a vehicle he had supposedly never searched before. The sentence appeared to know its own ending before the first letter was written. Audrey underlined it in red and wondered how often a man might use the same words before he stopped noticing them.
She called Harvey. "Tomorrow I'm going to the Bramwell courthouse annex. I want to read every forfeiture file the county makes available for the last three years."
"How many files can there be?"
"I don't know. That's why I'm going."
"Then I'm driving you."
At nine on Tuesday, October sixth, she entered the county clerk's office carrying a legal pad and three pens. Three public computers stood beneath a sign instructing visitors to keep their sessions to one hour if others were waiting. A clerk behind the counter recognized her from the photograph. Her expression was not hostile; it was a mixture of embarrassment and intense curiosity.
"Are you the judge from the news?" the clerk asked.
"Today I'm a member of the public reading public records. May I use the middle terminal?"
"Of course. They're all available."
Audrey sat down, entered the case index, and began listing dates. Behind the counter she heard the clerk pick up a telephone and say in a low voice, "She's here." Audrey recorded the time without turning around. The telephone call might have been innocent; it might not. Her first obligation was to distinguish observation from conclusion, even when the distinction gave her enemies room to hide.
An hour later she had copied the names, amounts, and final dispositions from nineteen files. By lunchtime she had read forty. None of those forty showed a criminal conviction associated with the forfeiture, and most showed no criminal charge at all. Audrey called Harvey to ask him whether the church kitchen had anything to eat because she had consumed nothing but coffee and half a pen cap.
"That's not food, baby girl," Harvey scolded.
"It is the only thing in this room that hasn't stared at me."
"How's the reading?"
"Forty records. No charges on any of them. Ask me tomorrow, when forty becomes a bigger number."
She returned Wednesday morning and continued until the county office closed. There were 312 files across the period she had selected. Two hundred eighty-seven contained signed waivers relinquishing money or other property. A disproportionate share of the cases involved Black and Latino motorists traveling through the corridor; that fact required more careful analysis than a stack of names alone, and Audrey marked it as a question rather than an established explanation.