“The DA,” she said again. “Slow.” “How slow?” “His office hasn’t subpoenaed any documents yet. They’re waiting to see what the DOJ turns up.” “That’s eighteen months.” “At least.” She thought about the word reviewing. The door. The patience and pressure in combination.
“What about Taggart?” she asked. “The AG inquiry touched on his involvement. He has an attorney now, retained, not public defender. Civil matters, not criminal. Which tells you something about where he thinks the exposure is.” Spates paused. “His attorney sent a letter last week. Taggart is willing to provide a voluntary statement to the AG’s inquiry.” She stopped. “Voluntary.” “With conditions. Immunity from criminal referral for the November 6th incident specifically.” “He wants immunity for calling Beaumont.” “Yes.” “What does the AG say?” “They’re considering it.”
She turned this over. Taggart with immunity for the call meant Taggart’s statement, whatever he said about the call, about the pattern, about the years of conversations that had preceded November 6th, became available to the AG’s inquiry without the complication of a potential Fifth Amendment assertion. It was not a good outcome for Beaumont. It was not a terrible outcome for justice. It was the kind of deal that made people who wanted clean endings uncomfortable. And made people who had done this long enough understand that clean endings were not the product being manufactured here.
The product being manufactured was record, evidence, a foundation that the next person, the next attorney, the next investigator, the next woman who pulled off the interstate and needed to understand what she’d pulled into, could stand on.
“Tell me about the missing document,” she said. Spates knew which document. He didn’t ask. “Nothing.” She had expected nothing. The rental agreement was gone, destroyed most likely at some point in the hours after Edson pocketed it by someone who understood what its absence from the evidence log would mean if anyone ever looked carefully. And the question was whether Edson had destroyed it on his own initiative or whether someone had told him to.
The answer to that question was somewhere in the forty-two minutes between the voicemail and the gas station. The answer was probably in a conversation that had no carrier record, no dispatch log, no body cam. A conversation held in the parking lot of a gas station or on a cell phone with the location settings off or across a table at the diner on Main Street in Delwood where Beaumont had been eating lunch twice a week for two decades. The answer might never be knowable.
She wrote it in her notebook anyway. Rental agreement, origin of destruction decision, unknown, not documented, not recoverable with current evidence. She underlined unknown. She did not underline it twice.
July 15th, when the federal monitor was appointed. A former federal district judge from the Northern District of Georgia, retired with a background in consent decrees and pattern or practice investigations. His name was Leon Pritchard. He had done this work before. Baltimore in 2015 and before that, a county in Louisiana that had taken four years to produce results that were partial, contested, and real.
His appointment was announced in a DOJ press release that Tamara read on her phone at her desk. She noted his name. She wrote it in the notebook. She turned to a fresh page. She was already on the next thing, a different county, a different pattern, a different preliminary file that had been sitting on her desk since February, waiting for the field phase. A different highway. A different exit.