"Don't thank me yet," she said. "Thank me when Tran stops smiling at the paperwork. He's been smiling since Tuesday."
Chapter 18: Eddie
Eddie Rook gave his statement on a Thursday, in the same interview room where I had taken statements from a hundred nervous men, except that this time I was not in the room. I read the transcript at June's desk with her permission and her pencil marks in the margins, and I read it twice, because the man I had built in my head — the careless cowboy who had fed my father's car into a crusher — did not survive contact with the actual Eddie Rook.
He was thirty-three. He had driven a tow truck for nine years, the last four for Rapid Recovery. He had a certification on the wall of the intake bay that he pointed out to the detectives, unprompted, as though it were a character witness. The transcript ran eleven pages, and on page three the interview turned to the Meridian.
He had photographed it himself. Standard intake was four photographs: front, rear, both sides. Eddie took nine. The transcript recorded a pause there, and June's voice on the page asking why.
"Under the cover it didn't look like junk," Eddie said. "Junk's got a shape. You've hauled enough of it, you know. This car sat right. The tires were new. Somebody loved it, you could tell just standing there. So I took extra pictures. I don't know. In case."
In case. He had been told by Gary Flint, by telephone that morning, to process the car fast — ahead of the queue, ahead of the statutory hold, ahead of the paperwork catching up with the steel. Eddie asked, the transcript said, whether the hold had been waived properly, and was told not to climb into the boss's business. He ran the car through anyway. That was the worst sentence in the eleven pages, and he did not run from it. When June asked why he had kept a copy of the intake photographs on his personal phone after deleting them from the company system, the transcript recorded a silence of nine seconds.
"Because it bothered me," Eddie said. "I kept thinking somebody was going to come looking for that car. And when somebody did, I wanted there to still be a picture of it whole."
June's margin note beside that answer, in her small square hand, was one word underlined twice: credible. I knew the weight she gave that word. In twelve years of files I had watched her cross-examine sheriffs and bank presidents without finding it necessary. Eddie Rook had earned it in a ninety-minute interview he had walked into voluntarily, without counsel, having called the station himself to ask when he could come in and say the thing he had been carrying around his own kitchen since spring.
A week after the statement, I was loading groceries into my truck in a market parking lot two towns over when a voice behind me said my name the way men say it when they have rehearsed it in a mirror. Eddie Rook stood there in a clean shirt with his hands empty and open at his sides, having clearly arranged them that way on purpose, and he apologized. Badly. Sincerely. Looking at his shoes for most of it, and at the asphalt, and once, memorably, at a shopping cart corral as though it might help him.
He had a speech and he lost it in the second sentence. What came out instead was the truth in pieces: that he had known the car was wrong within a minute of lifting the cover. That he had taken the photographs and then done the job anyway. That he had a daughter, and that her grandfather had a truck he had restored, and that Eddie had thought about that truck every day since the story came out in the neighborhood newsletter. That he was sorry in a way that had rearranged his sleep.
I let him finish. Then I put out my hand, and he stared at it like it was evidence, and shook it with the grip of a man holding something breakable.
"Mr. Rook," I said, "I want you to hear this from me, so you can stop practicing it in parking lots. What you did at the end of that job was wrong, and you know it, and the state will have its own conversation with you about it. But that photograph—" I had to stop for a second, there between the carts. "That photograph is the most honest thing in the file. Everything else in my binder is people protecting themselves. You took a picture of my father's car, whole, in the light, because it deserved a record. It's the first thing June shows people. It may end up being the last thing a jury looks at."