One produced draft scripts carrying the same phrases that appeared in Gloria’s messages.
Another remembered objecting when a script told a grandmother not to call police.
He said Adrian laughed and called it an ‘urgency test.’
Neither worker claimed to know every recipient.
Their limits made their accounts more useful, not less.
They described the work they actually performed, the instructions they actually heard, and the records they still possessed.
A search authorized by a court was carried out at the former Shoreline office and at several other relevant locations.
I did not attend, and I learned details only when they were presented through authorized channels.
Investigators recovered storage devices, accounting records, and copies of audio projects.
Some devices were encrypted and required specialized analysis.
Others contained only old invoices or unrelated client data.
The work took weeks and demanded care because ordinary customers had rights to privacy even when their information was stored beside suspected evidence.
One recovered project folder contained a sequence of filenames using Molly’s initials, Gloria’s age, and a set of internal dates.
The file timestamps matched several messages sent before the birdbath incident.
A note attached to one project said, ‘Place target at neighbor garage before patrol arrives.’
Detective Ward read the note twice.
It suggested that the attack on me had been more than an accidental result of a frightened grandmother.
But the note still needed an author and context.
Whoever wrote it might have planned a false report without expecting violence.
Or the note might have described the exact confrontation Derek wanted.
Alina’s job was to distinguish those possibilities.
I was asked to identify the yellow raincoat and the garage equipment shown in pictures stored with that project.
The images included a photograph of my house taken from the street, a snapshot of Tess’s silver sign, and a screenshot of the library workshop page.
I recognized the raincoat because a tear near one pocket matched the garment I had purchased.
Another photograph showed a person carrying a similar coat through the secondhand store.
The person’s face was not visible.
The investigators eventually established that someone had placed the coat at the store before I bought it, but the donation records were incomplete.
I had not thought much about the timing when I purchased it.
Now it appeared that whoever planned the messages might have been arranging for Gloria to see an object connected to Molly at exactly the wrong moment.
