The hearing also revealed something more disturbing.
The old tracer containers had been stored in a locked reference cabinet at a private warehouse retained by Finch’s company.
They should have been accounted for during the transition from the Sterling cleanup.
Instead, the inventory showed discrepancies dating back years.
The records identified several people who had access.
They did not authorize the public to treat any one of those people as guilty.
When the hearing recessed, a man sitting behind me muttered that the whole thing was a conspiracy.
I turned and told him it was a series of verifiable facts under review, and that we should avoid adding stories to the parts we did not yet know.
He looked annoyed.
I understood him more than I wanted to.
A conspiracy can sound cleaner than a record of ordinary shortcuts, financial pressure and deliberate misrepresentations.
But the untidy truth mattered.
It would determine whether actual people were held responsible for actual acts.
The missing photograph album returned on a Thursday in October.
Detective Tran called me to the station and asked me to identify it among several items laid out on a clean table.
The faded blue cover had a crease beside the spine, and Elise had written our family name inside the front flap in green ink.
I recognized the handwriting before I touched the cover.
A loose photograph had slipped between two pages.
It showed Hannah as a child standing on the pool steps with an inflatable yellow ring around her waist.
She had been missing her front teeth and laughing so hard her eyes were closed.
I asked whether I could take it home.
Tran said the photographs had been documented and the album could be released under the current evidence arrangements.
I signed the paperwork carefully.
“Where was it found?” I asked.
She told me it had been recovered from a locked cabinet at a contractor’s workplace, along with an envelope containing several photographs copied from different homes.
The investigation had not established who physically removed each item.
The contractor claimed some materials were provided to assist with property research.
That explanation was being evaluated.
“Why would somebody want our family album?” I asked.
Tran looked at the photographs.
“The image of your wall may have been useful to someone researching the old survey point.”
“Then why take the whole thing?”
“That’s one of the questions we’re still asking.”
I carried the album home on the passenger seat like it was something fragile enough to break if I drove too fast.
