Chapter 9

The number took eleven minutes to run.

Nadine Cross went back through the door behind the counter and came out twice - once to ask Kettering a question about the property system, once to pull a file. The second time she brought it with her.

It was thin. Sadie could see that from where she stood.

"E-eleven forty-seven," Nadine said. "That's an evidence-room tag. It goes on a box, not on a bag. It was assigned three years ago, when this file closed and the items were consolidated."

"Whose file?" Kettering said.

"Poe. Arlen Poe. Possession with intent. He got picked up six years ago, sat in this jail two years waiting on a lab report that never came, and pled out."

"And the items?"

Nadine turned a page. "Signed out of the room by R. Vance." She said the name without looking up. "Signed out, and there's no state lab receipt. No destruction order. No return." She closed the file. "It never left the building, Sheriff. It's on shelf nine."

The lobby was very quiet.

Sadie looked at Vance. He was standing with his arms crossed and his jaw set, and for the first time since 5:52 on Tuesday morning he looked like a man doing arithmetic.

"That's a clerical error," he said. "That happens. Somebody grabs the wrong bag off a shelf, the tag's still on it -"

"Royce," Kettering said. "Stop."

"You can't take her word -"

"I'm not taking her word. I'm taking Nadine's." Kettering put both hands flat on the counter. He was fifty-eight years old and he looked every day of it. "Shelf nine is a box of pills that was supposed to go to the state lab three years ago and get burned. And there is a bag off that box sitting in front of me with a woman's name on it and a photograph of it on the county website."

He picked up the phone on the counter.

"Who are you calling?" Vance said.

"The state."

Vance was placed on administrative leave at 6:40 that afternoon. It was in the Ledger by Thursday, along with the sentence that mattered: Deputy Royce Vance had been arrested and charged with evidence tampering, official misconduct and false imprisonment. He was booked into the same jail where Sadie had spent thirty-one hours, and he posted bond the same day.

Sheriff Dale Kettering was suspended by the county commission pending a state review.

Every case Deputy Vance had touched in four years was frozen.

Three weeks later, Nadine Cross called Deb's house and asked Sadie to come down to the department.

She had a folder on the counter and she opened it, and then she closed it again and looked at the door.

"After the state took the evidence room apart," she said, "they ran that tag number against every property photo in the system. Every booking where a bag was photographed with tape on the corner." She kept her hand flat on the folder. "Eleven other files carry that number. Yours makes twelve."

"Who are they?"

"The state has to notify them in writing first. I can't give you names." Nadine's jaw worked. "But there's one thing I can tell you, and then you need to go home."

She looked at the folder, and then at Sadie.

"One of them is still in. Third year of a twelve-year sentence."