"People drink and drive," Derek replied. "That's why we enforce the law."
"People do drink and drive," she said. "But we still have to prove what each person did. You never charged these sixty-one drivers with impaired driving. We have sixty-one cold beer references, sixty-one cash seizures, and sixty-one purchases matching the recurring price. I want to read every one so you can correct anything I have misunderstood."
She read from her pad, slowly. January ninth, purchase at 10:52, stop soon afterward, cash seized. February third, purchase at 6:40, a later stop, cash seized. March second, another purchase, another stop, the same sentence. She did not race through the names as though they were entries in a spreadsheet. She paused long enough to say where the driver had been going when the file established it and admitted when a report left that question unanswered.
The repetition altered the air in the room. Derek stopped leaning back. Drummond wrote fewer notes. The court reporter, whose job was to listen without reacting, continued turning each statement into lines that would survive long after everyone left. Harvey closed his eyes and listened to the numbers as though they were the first-Sunday count at Greater Hope.
When Audrey reached sixty-one, Derek interrupted. "You miscounted."
Audrey set down her pen. She looked at the page, then at him. "Then I'll count it twice."
Drummond objected to repeating a lengthy list. Audrey responded that each case had an individual plaintiff or property owner who might eventually need the record corrected, and that she would be satisfied to have her count checked against the underlying documents. Counsel could request a break, she added, but a complaint about the time required did not answer the numbers.
She began again. Her mother's voice seemed to accompany the first date and then the second, not as a ghost or a command but as the memory of a standard learned in childhood. If it's honest, it comes out the same both ways. Sixty-one entries passed beneath her finger, and every match remained exactly where it had been the first time.
At the end, Audrey turned to the last tab of her binder. She took out the gray archival photocopy she had been holding since Tuesday night. Harvey opened his eyes and watched her lay it between the store receipt and the county statement.
"Judge Tanaka ordered the county to search the remaining paper audit boxes for March 2019," Audrey said. "This page is from that search. It identifies an expenditure on March fourteenth at 6:02 a.m., card ending 4471, Exit 74 Fuel and Market. The description reads ice and water, patrol supplies. The amount is three dollars and twenty-nine cents."