Lorraine had asked that I be told she was sorry for striking me.
She had also said that if I hated her for it, I should wait until I learned what her son had promised to do.
Lorraine had one adult son, Paul.
He was a certified emergency medical technician and had moved to Pittsburgh years earlier.
I had not seen him in almost a decade.
I had no reason to believe he was connected to Westbrook Emergency Transport.
But by noon, the white van had returned.
It stopped outside Lorraine’s house, and the driver remained behind the wheel while a younger man carried two large boxes from the front porch.
A woman across the street, Mrs. Alvarez, watched from her kitchen window.
I called her instead of going outside.
She said the men told her Lorraine had requested a home cleanout before moving into assisted living.
Mrs. Alvarez knew Lorraine better than anyone on the block.
She said Lorraine had refused that suggestion when her doctor raised it only a month earlier.
The driver was wearing the same company jacket seen on my camera.
Mrs. Alvarez gave me the plate number without being asked.
She had written it down because the van was blocking her driveway.
I forwarded the number and her account to Munroe.
He replied that investigators were following the lead.
Then I remembered Warren’s old radio.
I went down to the library, used my staff badge to access the public equipment inventory, and looked through older donation records.
The county had given the library a collection of retired emergency broadcast equipment after a modernization grant.
Warren had signed the transfer as the volunteer technician.
Most of the devices were in storage.
The small radio from the blue folder might not have been in Lorraine’s house at all.
It might have been sitting for years in a locked library cabinet that I passed every working day.
The library smelled of floor wax and raincoats when I arrived just after lunch.
My supervisor, Rosa Chen, looked at my swollen cheek and asked whether I needed medical care.
I told her I had already spoken with the police.
She brought me an ice pack and waited while I explained only the part involving county property.
Rosa was not easily impressed by mysteries.
She had spent twenty years persuading officials that old records mattered even when nobody wanted to pay for storage.
