Chapter 10

Six weeks later, Sadie stood at the same laminate counter and signed her name eleven times.

The paperwork was thin and unglamorous. An expungement order signed by a circuit judge two hours away, because no judge in Bramlett would touch it. A booking-photo destruction order. A property disposition form. Charlene Boggs slid each page across the counter with two fingers, and she did not meet Sadie's eyes, and she did not have to.

Behind Sadie, through the glass front doors, two state investigators walked Deputy Royce Vance out of the building in handcuffs.

He passed close enough that she could smell his aftershave. He did not look up. He walked with his chin down and his shoulders pulled in, and the sound of his boots on the tile was the same sound she had heard on the wet road at 5:52 in the morning.

Sheriff Dale Kettering watched from his office doorway with a cardboard box at his feet and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He had been suspended three months and had announced he would not seek a fourth term. When Sadie looked at him, he nodded once. She nodded back. That was all either of them had.

Charlene slid the last page across.

There was a sticky note stuck to the bottom of it, in Nadine Cross's handwriting.

11 FILES - SAME TAG. LIST ATTACHED. CALL THE FIRST ONE.

The list was two pages, typed, with case numbers down the left side and names down the right.

The state had taken the evidence room apart shelf by shelf, and every case built on a bag off that box was in front of a conviction review panel. The county had been ordered to notify every person on the list in writing. Two convictions had already been vacated. Four more had hearings set. A woman in the next county had her charge dismissed on a Tuesday morning with her sister in the room. And one man was still in, third year of twelve, with a motion filed the week before and a hearing set for the fall.

Sadie sat in Deb's car in the parking lot behind the square and unfolded the list on the steering wheel and read the first name.

POE, ARLEN D. - 58 - WELBORN COUNTY

She typed the number into her phone. It rang four times.

"Hello."

"Mr. Poe? My name is Sadie Quinn. I'm calling from Bramlett County."

There was a long silence on the line. Long enough that she pulled the phone away and checked to see if the call had dropped.

Then the man said, "Say that again."

"I said I'm calling from Bramlett County."

"I heard you." His voice was thick, like he'd been asleep, or like he'd been holding something in his chest for a long time. "What do you want to know?"

Sadie looked at the list on the steering wheel. Twelve case numbers. Twelve names.

"I want to know what they did to you."

Arlen Poe laughed once, and it wasn't a laugh, and then he said the thing she would remember for the rest of her life.

"Ma'am," he said, "I have been waiting six years for somebody to ask me that."

Her first shift back at Cedar Ridge was a Tuesday, ten to six.

The unit smelled like antiseptic and coffee. The residents who were awake asked where she'd been, and she said she'd had some time off, and Mrs. Lattimore in room 9 told her she had missed the good pudding.

At 5:52 in the morning, Sadie clocked out, put her badge in her jacket pocket, and walked out through the double doors into a cold blue-gray dawn with fog lying in the low fields.

Her grandfather's truck was in the third row of the lot. Washed, with a new inspection sticker and a bag of Tommy's laundry on the passenger floor.

She got in. She put both hands on the wheel.

Then she started it and drove home.