Neither of them had an answer. Yolanda sat across the room, quiet, watching a good man run out of road to stand on. She'd started to say something—some kind of comfort she didn't quite believe herself yet—when her phone buzzed in her pocket: unknown number. She almost let it go to voicemail.
She answered instead, and a voice on the other end—young, shaking, barely above a whisper—said words that made her sit up straight in her chair:
"This is Timothy Langston. I need to talk to somebody, somewhere Bruce can't see us. Please. I have something you need to see."
The diner sat two towns over: half-empty, fluorescent lights buzzing over booths nobody was using at that hour. Yolanda picked it on purpose—far enough from the precinct that nobody wearing a badge would wander in by accident.
Timothy Langston was already sitting in the corner booth when she and Austin walked in, hands wrapped around a coffee cup he hadn't touched. He looked younger out of uniform, smaller somehow, like the weight he'd been carrying had taken something out of him physically.
"Thank you for coming," he said, voice unsteady.
Austin slid into the booth across from him, calm and unreadable, the way he always was when he needed someone to feel safe enough to talk. "You said you had something we needed to see."
Timothy reached into his jacket and pulled out a small, worn notebook, its cover soft from being carried too long in a pocket. He set it on the table between them like it was something that might go off.
"I've been writing things down," he said. "Since the night we searched the trailer. Every time Bruce did something that didn't sit right, I wrote it down: dates, times, what he said, what he did." His hand trembled slightly as he pushed it across the table. "Including the impound lot."
Austin picked it up carefully, flipping to the marked page. He read in silence for a long moment, and Yolanda watched his expression shift from professional caution into something sharper: recognition. This was the piece that had been missing.
"This is dated three days before the false log entry Bruce submitted to the court," Austin said slowly, looking up. "You wrote this in real time, independent of any department record."
"I know." Timothy's jaw tightened. "I was there. I watched him change the seal check entry with my own eyes. He told me it would 'give us room.' That's the word he used: 'room.'" He shook his head, disgusted with himself. "I helped write the first report, too—the fake one about Mr. Galvin resisting. I want that on record. I'm not trying to make myself look clean in this."