She marked November first in red on the kitchen calendar. Thirty days from the Friday purchase placed the video close to the end of its ordinary storage life. Exact replacement times could vary, Sunil had warned, so she treated every remaining day as borrowed time. Harvey asked how a judge could be forced to wait for a court order in a case involving her own rights.
"The same way anyone else waits," she said. "I know how often the delay hurts. Knowing it from the other side is the point of this work."
That evening Harvey called with a strange update. Sunil had telephoned the number listed in a Greater Hope Church directory near the store register, asking about the next Friday fish fry. He wanted to know whether strangers were welcome and whether Audrey sometimes attended. Harvey told him that the church had never made hunger prove its worth at the door.
"He asked if you were going to win," Harvey said.
"What did you tell him?"
"That I couldn't know yet. He was quiet for a long time after that. I think he's deciding what kind of help he can live with giving."
"And whether his family can live with the consequences."
"Both things can be true, baby girl."
Ten days after the requests went out, on Thursday, October twenty-second, a thick brown envelope arrived at Audrey's building. Harvey was already in the apartment, standing over a pot of greens as though nobody had taught him that a visiting deacon was not automatically the head cook. He pointed her toward the dining table and told her to eat before opening the county's response. She opened it anyway.
The county purchasing-card packet contained page after page of charges to several patrol units. Audrey found card 4471 assigned to unit seven, the patrol car Lyman had driven. She located the October second purchase, the same time and amount as Sunil's receipt. But the county expense description did not say beer. It said, "Ice and water - patrol supplies."
"The store says one cold beer," she told Harvey. "The county says ice and water."
"Can't both be true?"
"Not for the same item on the same transaction without somebody explaining the discrepancy. We need to know who submitted the description and what the original register recorded."
She took out the pad containing sixty-one red marks and began comparing dates. Some early records required clarification because archived payments had been posted days after purchase. Others had only partial expense details. She excluded entries she could not match confidently rather than forcing them into the pattern. By midnight she had identified repeated charges of exactly three dollars and twenty-nine cents near documented seizures that used Lyman's uniform bottle description.