These are dated, she said, touching the labels. The code, it's a date system. Month, year, she traced her finger along the row. These go from about 4 years before Daniel died to. She stopped, pulled the last box off the shelf, and looked at the label.
Two weeks before he died. Two weeks. He'd been here two weeks before he died. I was still looking at the corkboard. There were maybe 30 photographs pinned to it.
Aerial photographs, the kind you can pull from county records or commercial satellite imaging. Industrial sites, lots of land, what looked like access roads carved into undeveloped property. And then there were the night photographs taken from ground level. Long exposure, slightly blurred trucks, large trucks, the kind used for liquid transport, tankers. In some of the photographs, you could make up partial plate numbers.
In one photograph, there were men standing next to a truck. The photograph was grainy, taken from distance, but you could see their shapes. Three men. I unpinned that photograph and brought it to Clare. She looked at it.
Then she went back to the box she just opened and dug through it until she found a photograph in a clear plastic sleeve. She held it next to the one from the corkboard. Same three men. One of them was in both photographs. That's the photograph from the metal box, she said.
The one buried in the sinkhole. Daniel put a copy in the box in the yard and the original in here. He was leaving a trail. She looked up at me. If someone found one, they wouldn't know about the other.
He was splitting the evidence. I looked around the storage unit. At the boxes, at the corkboard, at the printer and monitor on the table. Claire, this didn't take two weeks to build. This took years.
She set both photographs down on the table. He never told me, she said, and for the first time, her voice wasn't quite steady, just for a moment. He spent years doing this and he never told me a single word of it. We pulled the first box and opened it on the folding table. Inside were printed spreadsheets, handwritten notes, and a series of documents that looked like they'd been pulled from public records, databases, property deeds, corporate filing documents, EPA correspondence records.
The kind of things that are theoretically available to anyone, but take a serious amount of digging to actually assemble. The property deeds all reference the same parcel of land, a 40 acre site about 12 miles from Alderton Road. Designated as agricultural, but clearly not being used for farming. The ownership structure was exactly what Evans letter had described. Three LLC's stacked, each one registered to a different name, each one registered in a different state, each one with a registered agent address that was a law office.
I pointed to one of the names on the top LLC. That name mean anything to you? Clare leaned in and looked. No. What about this one?