Chapter 16 - A VOICE FROM THE PARKING GARAGE
The federal agents found Lydia after checking nearby security cameras. She had slipped into a bus station two blocks from the garage and called her sister from a payphone.
She was frightened, not missing. When investigators reached her, she handed over a small black notebook and agreed to give a formal statement.
“I knew people were looking for the drive,” she later said in court. “I didn’t know they were willing to hurt someone over it.”
The notebook led investigators to a city-owned storage locker. Inside sat the archive drive, wrapped in an old police training sweatshirt. Pike had instructed a subordinate to move it there rather than destroy it immediately; he wanted to check whether other copies existed.
The drive required careful forensic work. The original files, their timestamps, and their transfer history had to be examined independently. Nothing was released to the public that day.
For the first time since the basement, I felt something besides fear.
Not victory. Possibility.
Gloria asked to see my scalp in the morning light. She sat me by the window, dabbed ointment on the remaining irritated places, and braided a small surviving patch near the back.
“When you were seven,” she said, “you told your teacher you wanted to be a judge because nobody listened to the cleaning lady.”
“I was an arrogant child.”
“You were a child who noticed.”
I held her hand. The skin across her knuckles was thin and marked by old work.
“I'm sorry I let him use you to frighten me.”
“You did not let him do anything,” she said. “He chose what he did. That is where the shame belongs.”
Elena arrived before lunch with an update: technicians had found an intact video file showing the critical minutes before Isaiah’s arrest.
Then she lowered her voice.
“The audio also picks up someone giving orders over the officers’ radio.”
The voice, she said, sounded like Captain Pike.
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20 CHAPTERS •
THE JUDGE THEY TRIED TO SILENCE
