He said the vehicle contained tools, empty packaging, and two boxes of solvent-based cleaning products.
He had been instructed to move the materials away from the building before a donor reception, but he did not remember who gave the order.
He denied knowingly leaving hazardous supplies inside the center.
He also denied threatening Paul, though he admitted advising him not to speculate about causes he could not establish.
The response was not the confession Daniel hoped for.
It contradicted some details in Paul’s memory and confirmed others.
Mara requested Lewis’s surviving dispatch records.
His company had changed ownership twice, but a box of old job sheets remained in storage.
The sheets showed an emergency pickup at Saint Alden scheduled for the afternoon of the fire and billed to the Alden Futures Trust.
The customer signature was illegible.
Another sheet showed a second pickup request entered the following morning, after the building had been sealed.
That second request was canceled with the notation no access permitted.
Caroline knew who had authority to order work through the trust.
The operations director could approve modest repairs, but emergency work above a certain amount required a committee chair.
Richard was chair that summer.
The billing did not prove he made either call, because assistants often used his authorization code.
It established that the trust funded the operations and that documentation existed where Richard had previously described the van as unrelated to the incident.
At the next conference Mara invited attorneys for several Saint Alden families to join a factual briefing.
Jessica attended with Priya and sat beside Hannah.
Daniel stood at the back, expecting to feel like an intruder in someone else’s grief.
Instead he saw adults who had spent years carrying photographs, names, and quiet suspicions.
A mother in a red scarf asked whether anyone had evidence that children were deliberately locked in the basement.
Mara answered that survivor testimony and staff accounts described restricted rooms, but the exact policies and individual decisions remained under examination.
An older father asked whether the cassette meant his daughter’s voice had been recorded.
The specialist said he could not identify every voice and would not invite families to guess from a distorted fragment.
The father put his hands over his face.
Daniel wondered how many times that family had been offered a possible answer, only to discover that certainty was farther away than promised.
He began to see why Richard’s fake dinner was cruel beyond the loss of a few photographs.
