Terry said, softly, “Steve might be inconsistent about everything else, but he could hold a grudge.”
Joe seemed to shrink. He wiped away the moisture in his eyes. “Fuck.”
Finally, Lena said, “So, Joe. Do you still think – is it out of the realm of possibility that Steve, maybe just in a moment of – I don’t know. That he could have done this?”
Joe slowly lowered his head until his chin rested against his dress shirt. “I don’t know.” His voice was almost inaudible. “Goddammit. Maybe.”
* * *
Mike and Lena had skipped lunch, rushing to catch Judge Cheever. In the car, they had talked a bit about Joe Pritchard – who had plans to fly back to Salt Lake City that afternoon – and the tension between him and Terry and Victor Fogarty. With Cheever’s consent, they moved on to the DSS armed with a court order to open old cases from Child Protective Services.
Shalene Jaquish was the assistant director, her position above both Harriet Fogarty and the remaining supervisor, Jessica Rankin. Jaquish was a fast-talking, busy woman, the kind that oozed efficiency. Even as she sat at her desk and reviewed the order from Cheever, she was getting things done. The phone rang, she answered it and spoke, solved a problem, sent an email.
She pushed the paperwork at Mike and Lena. “Come with me,” she said, and led them through a door, down a flight of stairs, where she snapped on a light in a massive underground records room.
“So,” she said, still moving, hips swinging along, “you can’t take anything out of this room. Copy machine is there in the corner. But I would guess if you’re going through all cases involving both Harriet and Corina Lavoie, you’re not going to want to Xerox everything or you’d be here a week.”
One of the overhead fluorescents was flickering; in one corner, the ceiling was festooned with cobwebs. “What’s that smell?” Lena asked Mike in a soft voice.
“We think there’s a dead mouse down here somewhere,” Jaquish said, overhearing. She finally stopped, squaring her shoulders with the end of a cabinet. “Here we go. 2000 to 2005. That what you’re looking for?”
Mike boggled at the sheer volume of information surrounding them: the whole thing resembled a kind of prehistoric data farm. Instead of servers in rows, there were storage units jammed tightly together.
“The units move on tracks, you control with these,” Jaquish said, and grabbed a large three-point knob and spun it. The first unit in the group rolled away, creating a corridor. Mike stepped in and had a look. Each unit had six shelves, bisected to form two sections, each about four feet wide, crowded with manila folders. There were a few colored folders – some reds and blues, interspersed.
“How is the information arranged?” Lena asked.
“Alphabetical, by client. If there’s many charts for the same client, then in year order for that client, then year order for the next client, and so on.”
“They’re not arranged by caseworker?” Mike’s heart sank a little.
Jaquish shook her head. “This is the area for Child Protective Services, these two sets of shelves cover 2000 to 2005.”
Mike looked around at all the other storage and did a quick mental calculation: Five-year sections, dating back to the establishment of DSS in ’77, meant roughly ten to fifteen of these cabinet blocks. “So what’s all the rest of this stuff?”
Jaquish put her hands on her hips and rotated around. “Disability, Adult Protective Services, Child Support, Medicaid, HEAP, Temporary Assistance, SNAP, Day Care, Accounting.” She finished her spin, pointed to a corner. “That’s the server over there. You might see Trevor Garris coming down here; he’s still working out all the kinks of our new EHR and all the networking. Hope that’s not a problem?”
“No, that’s fine,” Mike said. “Whatever.”
She looked at him, eyes sharp as a sparrow’s. “You’re lucky this isn’t Mental Health – they’re not required to hold onto anything past ten years. But with Child Protective Services in particular, children aren’t necessarily grown up ten years on. So…”
“What about transferring all this to digital?”
“We’re actually still in the process of that – have been for years – scanning and storing in digital. But we haven’t destroyed the old stuff yet.”
“How far back are you scanning?”
“Ten years.”
Mike suppressed a sigh. No luck jockeying a mouse and doing a little clicking instead of wandering around in the catacombs. To hell with this ‘old scores’ theory…
Jaquish flashed a quick smile then hurried back to her busy world. “Let me know if you need anything.”
Mike was surprised – the records room was treated like Fort Knox; he’d expected supervision the whole time. But she was already through the door and pounding back up the stairs. Then he looked around, saw the camera mounted in the corner.
* * *
“Well,” Lena said. She slid open the top drawer. “We’re only looking at three years, right? The overlapping years that Harriet and Lavoie both worked here.” She pulled out a file, flipped through. “Usually, the first thing is the referral sheet, that’s for the initial call. And then back here… okay, this is the discharge summary. And, see this? There’s the caseworker, right there.”
“But the referrals,” Mike asked, “they’re not all coming from the state register?” He kept eyeing the different-colored files, hoping for an easy way out of this and not seeing it.
“If it’s a civilian that calls the hotline, okay. But anyone with a public licensure to help children is a mandated reporter, and I don’t know if they have to go through the register.” Lena put the file back and jotted a note on a legal pad beside her. She seemed resolved to see it through, but Mike was still antsy.
He pulled out a red folder. “What about these?”
Lena looked over. “Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to need a bit more help. Hang on; I got someone to call.” She stepped away, pulling out her cell phone.
Mike heard her talking, then sifted through the photos in the red folder. They made him sick; pictures of a child’s arm and neck covered in huge bruises. He wanted to be chasing down Pritchard’s alibi, not seeing images of abused kids. But Lena was right – this was his idea. Pritchard looked good for it, but if they couldn’t connect him to Lavoie, it didn’t feel right, because one missing and one murdered caseworker in less than a year felt like more than coincidence. The idea was that it was someone like Gavin Fuller, but a decade or so back, whose resentment of Child Protective Services had cooked until it boiled over.
“Okay, Mary, thanks so much.” Lena stepped back into the aisle between cabinets. “So that was my friend who works for DSS in Oneida County. Certain cases might be classified in a different-color folder. Permanently separated families, for example.”
“Or serious abuse cases,” Mike said, holding up one of the pictures.
Her mouth formed a tight line. “Yes.”
He nodded at the red folders. “Then let’s start with these?”
“Okay. But let’s look for the discharge summary first, so we can separate out the ones with Harriet’s name, Corina Lavoie’s name.”
They pulled two smaller tables together and went to work, each amassing a stack of colored folders. The flickering fluorescent continued to bother Mike, and he could smell the bad smell now, too. He got up.
“What are you doing?” Lena glanced at the clock.
“Looking for that mouse.”
She didn’t say anything else, just tucked back into the work.
He didn’t care about the mouse, he needed a moment.
After he wandered back to the table, he’d formed the complete thought. “So, the people that call in the complaint, you know, about a child in danger, they can be anyone. Like we said, mandated reporter, or just someone off the street. And their name goes into the file.”