I watched it three more times. On the third time I made Teo stop it on the frame where her face is turned toward the camera, toward the front of the car, because she'd heard a noise or thought she had, and is looking right at the windshield, right at the little pulsing blue light behind the mirror, and doesn't see it. Doesn't know what it is. Has been looking at it, I'd learn later, every single night for four months on her compliance walk, and has never once thought about what it might be.
"Do you know who the man on the phone is?" Ruthanne said.
"I think so."
"Thinking's not knowing." She leaned back. "Teo's going to clean up the audio. Isolate the voices, reduce the vest noise. It'll take a couple of days, and it'll be done properly, with notes, so nobody can say we doctored it. In the meantime, I'm calling the sheriff's office. Not Saldana. Somebody above him."
"What about the hearing? It's next Wednesday."
"I know when the hearing is."
"They're going to expel him. They've already notified the Scholars program. He got a letter yesterday saying his acceptance is on hold pending—"
"Gisele." She held up her hand. "I've been doing this for thirty-one years. Let me do it."
The somebody above Saldana was a detective sergeant named Yvonne Okonjo, who had worked narcotics for the county for nine years and, Ruthanne told me later, had spent the three weeks since Colby Kuchar's overdose trying, and failing, to find out where a batch of counterfeit pills at Halverton East had come from. She was a compact woman with close-cropped hair and a navy blazer over a black turtleneck, and she came up the stairs to Ruthanne's office on Wednesday afternoon with a cup of coffee from the gas station on the corner and sat in my folding chair while I stood by the window, and she watched the clip twice, with Teo's cleaned-up audio, wearing a pair of cheap earbuds she pulled out of her blazer pocket.
When it was over she took the earbuds out and wound them around two fingers, slowly, very neatly.
"I'm going to need the original card," she said. "Chain of custody from Mr. Brask. And I'm going to need you both not to tell anybody about this. Not your son. Not your neighbors. Not your mother on the phone."
"My mother's in Florida."