I scanned the files, slowly running my fingers over the names as I made my way down. Nothing about a DUI received by Anderson was here; I knew Jia would have found it if it were.

If an officer wanted a case to disappear, it wasn’t hard. But the one thing an officer couldn’t get rid of as easily was evidence that the traffic stop had occurred. They had to call in to dispatch that they were pulling someone over. There might not be a police report, a booking sheet, or an inventory of the car, but there had to be a dispatch log letting the station know the officer had pulled someone over and why.

If Roscoe were telling the truth about Nathan Ficco injuring Anderson’s eye, and I did find a DUI stop that was never filed, then that meant whoever had pulled him over had buried the file. And whoever that was probably also had buried the stalking injunction that Patty tried to take out against Steven, and who knows what else, to protect Anderson Ficco. Someone may very well have been sabotaging this case from the beginning.

Toward the end of the row were the miscellaneous files. If an officer pulled someone over, there’d be a recording and then a transcript made and filed by the dispatcher. If an officer wanted a case to go away without it leading back to them, the officer would just not send it in to the prosecutor’s office and instead would funnel it here to be destroyed. And they couldn’t take the file themselves, because when the staff went through the files to destroy them and it wasn’t there, it would raise too many questions. Better to leave it here and wait until the end of the year when most departments cleaned out their archives.

I caught a lucky break since they were filed alphabetically; otherwise I’d be here all night.

I found a file with the name ANDERSON B. FICCO. It was dated ten months ago. I pulled it out, and it consisted of nothing but a dispatch log stating the officer had pulled Anderson over and then concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of driving under the influence and let him go. My eyes scanned up at the top of the sheet for the officer’s name . . . DETECTIVE MARK HOWARD.

It wasn’t entirely unusual for a detective to pull DUI duty in a small town like this with few police officers, but that this particular detective happened to pull over the son of the richest guy in town, who was now being charged with murder, set off alarm bells.

I took the file and hurried back upstairs. There was one more file I needed to see.

Jia opened the door after a couple of knocks. She was in workout clothes, and I could hear music.

“Tatum? What are you doing here?”