Munroe asked whether the city had retained any equipment photographs.
I found a faded inspection report with a diagram of the generator cabinet and its storage closet.
The inspector had noted a separate low-voltage radio antenna mounted beside the loading door.
The antenna was not required for the generator.
It belonged to the warehouse’s private security system, which transmitted an alarm whenever the loading door opened.
That system was installed by a contractor called Fairhaven Signals.
The company’s owner had retired, but a repair manual remained in the city archive.
The manual described a mechanical printout that stamped the time of each alarm when the power failed.
Munroe requested the historical maintenance files from the warehouse’s insurer.
The insurer had retained several documents because a break-in claim was filed shortly after Bellwood.
A printout was among them.
It recorded a loading door opening at two twenty-one and again at two twenty-nine.
A security guard signed the page at the end of his shift.
The times lined up with a gap in the ambulance log.
They did not tell us who entered.
Still, two independent systems now placed suspicious activity at the warehouse during the period the ambulance was supposedly elsewhere.
I kept thinking of how easily a missing entry became a convenient answer when nobody checked the next record.
At the library, people used to complain about archival storage costs.
They rarely thanked us when an old file turned out to matter.
Rosa said that was the nature of preservation.
If you only keep documents whose importance is already obvious, she told me, you have already lost the ones the future will need.
That afternoon, I received an email from a local journalist named Evelyn Park.
She asked whether I had evidence that the ambulance company was involved in the Bellwood fire.
I replied that I could not establish that and that she should speak with investigators and the affected families.
She thanked me for refusing to speculate.
An hour later, another reporter called and asked whether I had been drinking when Lorraine hit me.
I hung up.
By evening, neighbors were arguing about the assault as though it were a referendum on whom they liked.
Mrs. Alvarez brought a plate of cookies and said she had counted three unfamiliar cars circling the block.
I asked her to write down what she actually observed and not pursue anyone.
She agreed.
Then she asked why I had not gone to Lorraine’s house to confront Paul myself.
