They stopped outside a door decorated with photographs of current students.

Joanna pointed at a boy holding a trumpet and said Eli would have been about his age when he first began practicing seriously.

Her voice caught.

Rachel put a hand on her aunt’s shoulder.

They stood there until the custodian dimmed the hallway lights, then left together without speaking about the investigation.

Carol returned to Ortiz’s office without waiting for a summons.

She brought a small stack of documents from Martin’s private cabinet, including a handwritten inventory of the contents of the blue box.

The inventory listed two tapes, not one.

Carol explained that she had remembered seeing Martin remove a cassette years after the accident and place it in a brown envelope.

At the time she assumed he intended to give it to his lawyer.

She searched the house after the box was discovered and found the empty envelope beneath a drawer liner.

Ortiz asked what Carol expected investigators to do with the information.

Carol answered that she wanted them to know she might have unknowingly moved evidence when she helped Martin clean his office.

She recalled carrying several folders to a storage locker after his final hospitalization, but she could not identify their contents.

Anna joined the interview for part of the time and confirmed that her parents had rented a locker near the highway.

The company had closed years earlier, and its records were held by a successor business.

Finding any surviving materials would require additional work.

Rachel learned about the statement through a limited update from Ortiz.

She appreciated that Carol had volunteered information without a private bargain, but she did not assume the gesture erased her earlier deception.

Investigators traced the storage locker to a facility that had been demolished.

Records showed its contents were auctioned after nonpayment, and most lots could not be reconstructed.

A buyer who collected old office equipment remembered purchasing metal cabinets, but he had sold them years before.

The missing tape remained missing.

The uncertainty disappointed Anna deeply.

She had hoped every new record might clarify the father who had spoken in contradictory ways throughout her childhood.

Rachel told her that a second recording might never be found and that the investigation could still reach meaningful conclusions.

Anna admitted she was less worried about legal findings than about the things she had repeated at school to defend Martin.

“I told other children your father was a liar,” she said.

“I repeated what Dad told me because I wanted to be loyal.”