"Does a purchase like that happen often?" she asked.
"A single cold one? Sometimes. The same price. Usually early in the day."
"Who buys them?"
Sunil's expression closed. "I didn't say a name."
"No," Audrey agreed. "And I won't supply one for you."
She glanced up at the small security cameras over the register and the refrigerators. Sunil explained that the franchise recorded video remotely on a rolling retention schedule, about thirty days, after which older footage was automatically replaced. Store employees could review clips but were not authorized to preserve permanent copies without corporate approval. The cameras might show who made the transaction, but the same system that preserved the video also put its continued existence out of Sunil's hands.
"Can the company keep it if it chooses?" she asked.
"Yes. They usually need a formal request."
"Then I'll write one. And I'll make clear that it's a request, not an order."
At the door she asked about the black ribbon. Sunil walked to the third refrigerator and frowned. He stocked that cabinet himself every morning and had not noticed the ribbon at six. He reached to untie it, then stopped, leaving the knot undisturbed as if some part of him understood the ribbon might now belong to the record of this visit.
"Who put it there?" Audrey asked.
"I don't know. But whoever did wasn't selling beer."
On the drive back to Baltimore, Audrey called Harvey and read him the line about the county purchasing card. His first response was a long whistle. His second was to ask whether she had told Sunil she was a judge.
"He recognized me from their photograph," Audrey said. "I told him he could decide for himself."
"And did he?"
"He gave me the receipt. That was his decision. Now I need to make sure nobody can honestly say I pressured him into it."
She wrote two preservation letters, one addressed to the store and one to its video-service provider. She named the date, the time window, and the camera views she believed relevant. She signed only as Audrey Sinclair and made no demand for special treatment. The company acknowledged her request within an hour but did not promise to preserve anything without an order from a court or other proper authority.
"Received and noted," Harvey repeated when she read the reply aloud. "What in the world does that mean?"
"It means somebody read it. It doesn't mean the footage is safe."
Audrey requested county purchasing-card statements, the breath-testing equipment's activity log for October second, the evidence-room intake records associated with the suspected beer bottles, and archived files from March 2019. She knew several requests might be denied, narrowed, or delayed under privacy and retention rules. Still, recording what the county would and would not disclose could matter as much as any single document it handed over.