She nodded.
Every day, she said.
Then I saw the van outside your garage, and I panicked.
I asked why she accused me of attempting to drag her into my house.
She said she wanted the officers to treat her as the complainant until the van left.
That answer hurt more than the bruise.
You were willing to make me look dangerous, I said.
She lowered her eyes again.
I was, she admitted.
I believed the video would clear you.
I didn’t think about what it would do to your daughter before then.
Lorraine apologized again, this time without explaining herself.
I told her I had heard the apology but was not ready to accept it.
She said she understood.
Munroe concluded the interview with questions about dates, telephone calls, and the location of the remaining equipment.
Lorraine provided the name of a storage business where Warren had rented a unit before he died.
The account was closed, but she thought the radio’s original carrying case had been sent there.
She had no idea where the equipment itself was now.
Outside the station, I felt exhausted rather than relieved.
The neighbor who attacked me had not been acting without reason.
Her reason still did not excuse what she did.
I wanted to hold both truths without letting either erase the other.
The first useful result from the whistle came on Thursday evening.
Munroe called to say specialists had recovered several short recordings and an index file from the memory card.
He would not play them for me, and I did not ask him to make an exception.
He explained that the file structure suggested the card had been copied from older audio equipment and later edited for storage.
That meant investigators could use it as a lead but still needed to authenticate the transmissions against independent records.
An unexpected voice appeared in one segment.
It belonged to Graham Voss, or at least to a man the technicians thought sounded like him.
Munroe would not say what the voice said.
He asked whether I could identify the industrial loading dock shown in the folder.
I gave him the warehouse address and offered the maintenance records the library kept from neighboring properties when they affected flood drainage.
The warehouse was not a library building, but I knew the road because our bookmobile sometimes passed it.
In the following days, investigators obtained records from multiple sources.
