Though the chicken would be tasty, too.
“We mince the garlic next,” she said. Her gaze traveled around the kitchen, looking a little lost. As if, after a twenty-year absence, she’d wandered into a neighborhood she used to know.
“The garlic is right there,” I said, pointing to a bulb on the counter. “And I’ll grab you a cutting board.”
We worked together in relative silence, but it was nice to have some company in the kitchen for once. I sliced open the chicken breasts while she mixed garlic, olive oil, feta cheese and lemon zest.
“This gets a little messy,” she admitted as she began to spoon the cheese mixture onto the chicken breast. “Is the oven pre-heated?”
“Whoops. I’ll do that now.”
Someday I’d make this dish for Jude in our kitchen. At the end of a long day we’d cook dinner together and decompress. Jude would tell me stories about the crazy ways people managed to dent their cars, and I’d tell him about the cases on my desk at work.
I’d mince the garlic while he prepped the salad. We’d eat together at our tiny kitchen table, make out on our sofa and then make love in our bed.
These were the happy thoughts that got me through the long days without him. Even if we had the world’s smallest apartment somewhere, I couldn’t wait to close the door and throw the lock in a home that belonged only to us.
It was totally going to happen.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. Hoping it was Jude, I left my mom washing some spinach and took the call in the living room. “Hello?”
“Sophie?” a male voice whispered. “It’s Rob Nelligan.”
“Oh, hi Rob!” I said a little louder than necessary. But I didn’t want to seem as if I was sneaking off to take a call if no sneaking was required.
“Listen,” he said, his voice so low I could barely hear him. “That file you asked me to check out? I found some highly irregular things.”
“You…really?”
“Yeah. But now I think the chief knows I was digging. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. But the network shut down right when I was in the middle of reading it.”
“Hmm.” Now we were both paranoid. “What did you find, though?”
“Well, every case file has a digital log cataloguing each time it’s edited. Each edit gets a timestamp. It notes every change made to the file and when the pieces were uploaded. Stuff like that. Nobody can alter the log—that’s a security feature.”
“Okay?”
“The log for this file shows a bunch of crime-scene photos uploaded the day after the accident. But they’re all gone now. Someone deleted them a few hours after they were uploaded. And there’s no video of the interrogation, which is especially weird.”
“Because…interrogations are supposed to be taped?”
“Yeah. And on a sensitive case like this? It’s a real red flag if there’s no tape.”
“Wow. Is that all?”
“No. The text of the report was uploaded twice, which isn’t that weird. But the new version doesn’t show what was changed, which is also against procedure. Someone just wiped the slate clean about forty-eight hours after the first report was filed.”
“So you mean…”
“Oh shit,” he swore. “Gotta go.”
Click.
I stared at the phone in my hand for a long moment, trying to make sense of what he’d just told me. The file had been doctored. Photos were missing.
This was going to make our visit with May’s lawyer friend even more interesting. But where the hell were those photos? If anyone knew, it would be my father. But there was a zero percent chance he’d tell me if I asked.
I couldn’t ask. But I could look around.
Leaving the living room, I tiptoed toward the back of the house. My mother had already departed the kitchen, retreating back upstairs. I heard her TV switch on. Otherwise, the house was silent.
Keeping quiet, I made a beeline for my father’s den. He had a big oak desk in the corner where he sat to pay bills. I’d never opened the file drawers in here before. But now I tugged the handle for the top drawer, and it rolled open on well-oiled glides.
Not for nothing did my dad spend eight years in the military. Each file folder had a label (“bank statements,” “heating oil”) typed in black on a shiny white label. I checked the lower drawer, too, finding the same thing.
On every folder but one.
I tugged out the blank file and popped it open in my hands. Glossy photos spilled out immediately, and I scrambled to keep them from cascading to the floor. They were color prints—plain old four-by-six inchers—of Jude’s wrecked Porsche. There were no people in the photos. But the passenger’s side door had been removed. And the passenger’s seatbelt strap dangled uselessly from the ceiling where it had been cut in half.