Isaac already knew something that nobody in Sullivan's office had bothered to check: his father's cleaning assignment that night was the west wing, third floor. The IT room was on the second floor, east wing. There was no overlap, no reason for Elijah to be anywhere near that room. The cleaning log proved it.
But that wasn't enough. A cleaning log could be dismissed; Sullivan would call it a piece of paper. He needed more.
Isaac pulled out a folded document from his back pocket. He'd requested it three days ago from the county clerk's office, a public record available to anyone who asked. Nobody ever did.
The courthouse maintenance access log.
Every room that required special clearance—the IT room, the evidence storage, the security office—kept a sign-in sheet: date, time, name, signature. It was policy; nobody could enter those rooms without logging in.
Isaac ran his finger down the entries from March 14th: 8:00 a.m. — Thomas Briley, IT Department, routine check. 2:15 p.m. — Thomas Briley, IT Department, software update. 11:45 p.m. — Bradley Carson.
Isaac stopped breathing. 11:45 p.m. Bradley Carson signed into the IT room at 11:45 p.m. on the night of the alleged theft. His own handwriting, his own signature. The same man who claimed he saw Elijah carrying boxes out of that room at 11:30 p.m.
The math didn't add up, and that was the point. If Carson saw Elijah stealing equipment at 11:30, if he witnessed it with his own eyes, why did he walk into that same room fifteen minutes later? Why didn't he call security? Why didn't he report it immediately? Why did he wait until the next morning?
Because he didn't see anything. Because Elijah was never there. Because Bradley Carson was the one carrying those boxes.
Isaac held the maintenance log with both hands, his fingers trembling against the edges—not from fear, but from the electricity of knowing. The certainty of it. The kind of certainty that changes everything.
Carson had signed his own confession. He just didn't know it yet.
But Isaac still needed one more thing: the security camera footage. He couldn't access it himself; that would be illegal, and anything he pulled would be thrown out. So he did it the right way, the legal way. He sat on a bench outside Courtroom 3, pulled out his yellow legal pad, and drafted a subpoena request for the courthouse security footage from March 14th, 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., second floor, east wing—camera angles covering the IT room corridor and the loading dock. Clean, specific, by the book.
He filed it with Dorothy Adams at 7:30 a.m. She read it, looked at him over her glasses, and stamped it without a word.
Isaac walked out of the clerk's office and past the IT room one more time. He glanced up at the camera, red light still blinking. That camera had seen everything. And in two hours, so would the judge.
Courtroom 3, 9:00 a.m. sharp. The room was packed. Word had spread through Greenfield like wildfire: the janitor's kid was going to defend his father in open court. People came to watch the way people slow down for car wrecks—not out of sympathy, but out of curiosity, out of hunger for something to laugh about over lunch.