Framed: Ten Years Stolen

Chapter 5

The Kane County Sheriff's Office keeps its public records window behind the same counter where they take fingerprints, which tells you what the building thinks the public is.

Grace filed the request on a Tuesday, on letterhead, under the Freedom of Information Act: all dispatch logs, incident reports and radio recordings for the night of the Miller fire, plus the evidence-room access logs for the relevant years. The clerk who took the pages was named Dottie. She had been stamping paper in that office since I was in middle school, and she stamped Grace's letterhead without looking up, without looking at me, without anything.

"Ten business days."

"We'll wait the ten," Grace said pleasantly. "Unless the Sheriff would prefer to be prompt."

The Sheriff preferred to be prompt. On the Thursday a deputy brought us up to Briggs's office — the big one this time, not the little interview room. Flags in the corners. Framed commendations marching up one wall. And behind the desk, a photograph of a younger Briggs shaking hands with a younger Victor Hale across a table of seized rifles, both of them grinning at the camera like the future had already paid up.

On the desk sat a stack of photocopies, maybe forty pages. The top one was the dispatch log for the night of the fire. I knew the header before I could read it. My whole life, in timestamps, in a deputy's handwriting.

"Forty pages in two days," I said. "This county never moved that fast for me. Makes a man wonder what's in them."

"There's no conspiracy here, Reed." Briggs settled back and gave me his porch smile. "There's just a file. Files get old. Files get handled." He lifted the top page between two fingers and held it up so we could read the date. Then he fed it into the shredder beside his desk.

The shredder made a small, contented sound.

"Oops," he said.

He fed it another page. Then another, unhurried, watching Grace while he did it, because Grace was the audience he wanted — a lawyer from a project, with her letterhead and her city manners. I was only the occasion. He wanted her to learn that paper in Kane County existed at his sufferance.

"Duplicates exist somewhere, I'm sure," he said, feeding the last of the log through. "File another request. We're very responsive here. Ask anybody."

Grace stood, smoothed her skirt, and thanked him. We walked out past Dottie, who was staring at her keyboard with great concentration, and down the front steps into the October light.

In the Subaru, Grace took the brooch off her jacket — the plain silver circle I had seen her wear every day since the parking lot — turned it over, and showed me the lens at its center, no bigger than a shirt button.

"Everything since the parking lot," she said. "I haven't entered a public building in this county unrecorded since the week I took your case. It backs up to the cloud in real time." Her voice was even and bright. "He checked my bag at the door, Caleb. He was looking for a phone. He never looked at the brooch."

"He has searched every bag I've carried into that building since the day I filed your first request," she added, and pinned the brooch back at her collar, where it would sit through every hearing to come. "The county keeps looking for the weapon. It has never occurred to the county that the witness might be wearing it."

The segment ran that night on the ten o'clock news out of Rockford, and it ran long.

I watched it in the weekly room by the interstate, on the bed with my shoes off and a cup of vending-machine coffee going cold in my hand. My name in the chyron, and under it, in the patient typeface of local television, WRONGFUL CONVICTION. And then, in brooch-level clarity, the Sheriff of Kane County feeding my trial's dispatch log into a shredder, one page at a time.

Oops, said the Sheriff, to a hundred thousand people.

The anchor did not editorialize. She said the Illinois Bureau of Investigation had been contacted and had confirmed it would review the matter. She said calls to the Sheriff's office had not been returned. And then she said the sentence that must have landed in that office like a brick through the windshield: "The Sheriff's personal phone, we're told, has been ringing all evening."

I watched the segment twice. Then I turned the television off, checked the chain on the door, and made sure the chair still fit under the knob. It was October. The county was getting cold, and the county was getting interesting.

Grace called at eleven.

"Don't celebrate," she said. "A man like that doesn't fall. He gets pushed, or he gets scared. And scared is worse for us. Watch your room tonight. Sleep light."

"Grace. I slept light for ten years."

"I know," she said. "That's what worries me about him, Caleb. He still thinks you're the boy in the interview room."

At ten to five, headlights swung across my curtains and stopped outside my door. Three car doors opened at once.