Harvey drew in a slow breath. Audrey placed the next page beside it, showing the cross-reference to a seizure of four thousand one hundred dollars recorded later on the same route. The officer's initials appeared in the file. She waited until Derek had looked at both sheets before speaking again.
"Sixty-two," she said. "One more case. March fourteenth, 2019."
Harvey reached into the pocket of his church suit. He unfolded his old paper waiver and placed it beside Willa's recovered envelope. His hands shook a little, but his voice held when he spoke.
"That's me. You took four thousand one hundred dollars off me on the way to Newark, son. You wrote your name on the paper, and I signed because I had a load to deliver. I spent seven years thinking I was the only man foolish enough to be scared."
Derek looked at the old receipt. He could not make it disappear by refusing to recognize the handwriting. Audrey watched his face without trying to interpret every flicker as guilt. What mattered was that the paper and the audit sheet had been put before him and that a sworn record now existed showing his opportunity to explain their relationship.
Drummond closed his folder. He conferred with his client, then announced a halt to the deposition so he could advise Lyman about potential criminal exposure. Audrey confirmed for the reporter that the defense had requested the break. She did not demand that a shaken witness keep answering merely because the answers might help her. The same rules that had protected her right to decline a false waiver had to remain meaningful when the person facing difficult questions was Derek Lyman.
The camera's red light remained on long enough for the reporter to enter the official ending time. As she reached for her equipment, her sleeve shifted. A thin black ribbon, tied in a neat knot, encircled her wrist. Audrey noticed it first. Harvey followed her gaze, then looked toward the door as the woman gathered the transcript materials and departed without comment.
"Same knot," Harvey whispered. "Mile marker. Store refrigerator."
"Same color," Audrey replied. "Possibly the same knot. We still don't know who tied any of them."
"That reporter knows something."
"Maybe. We shouldn't turn every ribbon into a confession."
Harvey nodded, though the questions remained in his eyes. Across the table Derek sat without his usual smile, staring at the three-dollar receipt. The numbers had not defeated him through cleverness. They had survived his refusal to let anyone read them in the first place.
Audrey carried the binder down the courthouse steps. Outside, the afternoon was cool and ordinary, traffic moving past as though no fifty-page transcript was being prepared upstairs. Harvey paused by the rental car and asked how it felt to find his old four thousand one hundred dollars written into a newer argument about the law.