Lorraine had called her last month and asked whether she still wanted the truth, even if it implicated people she knew.
Keisha said yes.
Then Lorraine stopped answering her phone.
I told Keisha about the assault without trying to justify it.
She looked at the bruise along my jaw.
I’m sorry that happened to you, she said.
But I am glad you didn’t push her back.
I said it had not been a difficult decision to keep my hands down.
Keisha shook her head.
It is easy to call yourself calm before someone humiliates you in public, she said.
You didn’t make the moment worse.
I had been blaming myself for not seeing the van’s plate, for leaving my garage unlatched, and for letting my camera password remain unchanged.
Her words did not erase those mistakes.
They reminded me that choosing not to retaliate had been worth something.
Before we parted, Keisha asked whether she could attend any future public hearing about Bellwood.
I said she should have the opportunity to decide that, and that investigators could tell her what proceedings were open to the public.
She closed the notebook.
Then she asked one final question.
What did Lorraine want from you when she hit you?
I thought carefully before answering.
She wanted something to happen quickly enough that men in a van couldn’t stop it, I said.
Keisha looked at the table for a long time.
Then let’s make sure what happened afterward doesn’t belong to those men either, she said.
The warehouse stood at the end of a road that most people used only when they missed a turn.
A row of shuttered businesses faced a chain-link fence, and the loading dock sat behind a concrete wall painted with faded company logos.
I did not go there to investigate.
Munroe had asked me to identify a city maintenance record, and the safest way to do that was in his office with the building plans open between us.
The record showed that the industrial road lost power at two fourteen during the Bellwood fire.
The outage had been blamed on a transformer fault caused by rain.
An adjacent warehouse carried a generator that had been inspected earlier that year.
Its owner was an investment company whose registered agent later worked for Graham Voss.
That relationship did not prove Voss controlled the premises on the night of the fire.
It showed why investigators needed to obtain the property records rather than accept a company explanation at face value.
