“You don’t think they’ll remove him?” “I think they might. I think they might not. I think the DOJ investigation makes it more likely. And the AG inquiry makes it more likely. And the IA determination makes it more likely. But I’ve seen three counties in four years where more likely still wasn’t enough.” She paused. “What I know is that the documentation is real. The voicemail is real. The body cam is real. Whatever happens with Beaumont. Those things exist in the record. They don’t go away.”
Spates was quiet for a long moment. “The rental agreement,” he said. “Edson’s pocket.” “Still missing.” “Seventeen people before you.” “Seventeen that we documented. More that we didn’t.” Another silence. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
She looked out the window at the parking garage. The gray concrete, the levels rising. The particular anonymity of a structure whose only purpose was to hold things in place temporarily until they moved on. “Go back to work,” she said.
Five months after the gas station, Taggart Fuel and Mart was open. The pumps ran. The sign above the door still said Clement J. Taggart, established 1991. The hand-painted notice on the door, No loitering. Management reserves the right, was still there. The cameras were new. Both of them, the one on the pump pillar and the one above the register, had been replaced in February. Upgraded to a digital system with cloud backup that could not be disabled from the register.
The upgrade was one of the conditions in a preliminary civil settlement agreement, unsigned as of May. Still in negotiation between Spates and the county attorney’s office. The county was not admitting liability. The county was never admitting liability. But the cameras were in.
The camera under the canopy overhang, the hemisphere dome unit on the south-facing side, the one Tamara had identified by the angle of Taggart’s shadow, had also been upgraded. No one had mentioned that camera in any official document. No one had tried to take its footage. The footage from November 6th was in a secure location. It had been since November 7th.
Taggart had not been charged. He was not, as of May, the subject of any formal criminal referral. The DA’s office review was ongoing. His name appeared in the IA determination three times. Twice as the person who made the dispatch call and once as the source of the voicemail to Beaumont. The determination noted, carefully, that his involvement in the events of November 6th warrants separate examination. Separate examination. Another door.
In the drawer of a desk at the Atlanta field office, in a file that had grown considerably since October, there was a photograph. Not a surveillance photo. An ordinary photograph taken from a public road of a gas station on Highway 41 in Delwood, Georgia. The photograph showed the pump island, the canopy, the sign, the door. The photograph had been taken in September, during the preliminary assessment phase, before the field component began. It was the kind of photograph taken so that later, when you needed to remember what a place looked like before anything happened, you had something to look at.
Tamara had taken it herself on a reconnaissance drive she hadn’t put in any report. It sat in the drawer. She hadn’t looked at it since November. She thought about it sometimes. Not often. But sometimes, in the particular quality of quiet that came in the late afternoon, when the office sounds had settled and the parking garage outside the window held the last of the day’s light.