"You said you never purchased alcohol on duty. Who used your assigned card at eleven-twelve that morning?"
"Other officers could've had the card."
"Who?"
"I don't know."
"Which officer was driving unit seven that morning?"
"I was."
"And when you stopped me?"
"I was."
Drummond objected that the expense statement and sales receipt did not prove the individual purchaser's identity. Audrey agreed that identification required more. She turned her laptop toward the deputy and explained that Sunil Mehta had made the copy, documented the export, and sworn to its origin. She invited counsel to reserve any argument about admissibility for Judge Tanaka.
"You said you never bought alcohol while on duty," Audrey said. "Let's watch the transaction the camera preserved."
On the screen Derek Lyman entered the third cooler, took a cold brown bottle, carried it to the counter, and presented a purchasing card. The register recorded the transaction. Through the glass beyond the counter the outline of patrol car seven was visible in the parking lot. There was no dramatic soundtrack, no title identifying the guilty, no caption telling the viewers what to think. There was only a deputy buying beer on a working morning.
Harvey put one hand over the envelope and kept it there. The reporter's fingers moved steadily. Derek stared at the screen until Audrey paused it and asked whether he recognized the man on the recording. His answer came too quietly for the microphone the first time.
"It's me," he said again.
"Were you on duty at the time?"
"Yes."
"Did you purchase that bottle?"
Drummond conferred briefly with his client. Derek acknowledged the purchase but said buying a bottle did not prove what he later found in Audrey's car. This was technically true, and Audrey said so. She asked where the purchased bottle went and whether it had been placed in the cruiser cooler. Derek did not give a clear answer.
"There are a lot of reasons somebody might buy a cold one," he said. "One bottle isn't a conspiracy, Judge."
"One bottle is one bottle," she replied. "Let's examine the other records before deciding what the whole pattern is."
She displayed the purchasing-card entries she had matched to Lyman's reports across three years. The recurring three-dollar-and-twenty-nine-cent charges ended on October fifth, immediately before her visit to the clerk's terminal. She asked whether Lyman had changed his habits after learning she was reading forfeiture records. He claimed the timing meant nothing and suggested he might simply have become tired of buying ice.
"Perhaps," Audrey said. "Then let's talk about the reports."
She opened the binder to the section containing sixty-one red marks. The wording recurred exactly in Lyman's seizure narratives: one open beer bottle recovered from under driver's seat. Each report was associated with an amount of money taken and, in the cases she had selected, no resulting alcohol-related conviction. Audrey asked whether he had personally found that same sort of bottle in that same place on sixty-one different occasions.