I just thought you should know the shape of what he's doing now. " Boon looked out the bay door at Larkin Street. An ordinary Thursday morning, a delivery truck, a woman walking a dog, the town going about its business the way it did every day, carrying everything it carried. Patient in the way that places lasting their problems had to be patient. He thought about Ruth waiting 9 years. Foster keeping 11 years of records.
Walt Callahan writing an index for someone he'd never meet. Trusting they would eventually arrive and know how to use it. He thought about what it meant. All those separate years of patience, all those separate accounts of the same long story, kept carefully and stored safely and held in reserve for a moment that might or might not ever come. It had come.
He picked up his phone and called Sheriff Dana Marsh. She answered on the second ring. I figured I'd be hearing from you, she said. I'd like to meet, Boon said. Somewhere neutral.
Ruth Callahan's place, Marsh said. Sunday at 8. She'll open it if you ask. She will, Boon said. And Mr.
Ashford, Marsh said. Bring whatever you have. Not descriptions of it. The actual things. Understood.
Boon said. He hung up. Stood in the garage a moment. The radio played on behind him. Something old, something that had been through a few things before it got to him.
He thought, "Step by step. That's how you did the hard work. Not by looking at all of it at once. By working what was in front of you until it was done and then moving to the next thing. " He turned back to the truck on the lift. He had a fuel injector to replace.
He started there. Boon called Patricia Haynes on a Saturday morning, standing in the garage with coffee going cold on the workbench beside him. She answered on the first ring, which was one of the things he'd always valued about her. Patricia Haynes was 61 years old, had practiced law in Memphis for 32 years, and had the professional manner of someone who understood that her clients problems did not confine themselves to business hours. He walked her through the situation, Pierce, the article, the letter to Foster, what Ren had learned from Dalton in the parking lot, the meeting with Ruth, and what Walt's box contained.
Patricia listened without interrupting, the way good lawyers listened. Not waiting for a gap to speak, but actually taking things in. When he finished, she asked three questions, precise, sequential, each one building on the answer before it. The photograph, she said finally. Walk me through exactly how it came into your possession and what you've done with it since.
He did the gathering in 1999. Someone else's camera, a copy he'd kept without knowing why. The way you kept certain things without being able to articulate a reason. 25 years in a shoe box under expired passports and old photographs. He hadn't shown it to anyone outside a private conversation.