Last
Call

I'm writing this from the county address because I want it to exist somewhere I can't delete it. Read it once. Then I'll text you from my own phone and we can talk like people.

I'm Lena Voss. I'm a deputy, but not last night. Last night I was the woman on the third stool from the register, the way I've been every night for four years, because your father makes the only decent eggs between here and the state line and because a diner at one in the morning is the only place in this county where nobody needs anything from me.

Teo told you to ask me what I was looking at. Here it is. From my stool you can see the lot in the front window, backwards, the way a window shows you things at night. At 1:58 a car came in with its lights off and parked at the dark end. I knew the car. I've seen the plate on the courthouse steps. I'm not going to type the name into a county email. And I looked at my phone instead of the window, because a man I'm not supposed to know was texting me from a truck that wasn't due for half an hour.

Attachment one is the report I filed at 4:10 this morning. It says I responded to a 911 call at 2:46 AM and found your father in the lot. It says that because I wrote it. I did not respond at 2:46. I was there from ten past one. I called it in from the lot at 2:41 with my hand on his chest and I gave my name like I'd just arrived, and then I wrote it down that way, because a deputy who sat on a stool all night while eighteen thousand dollars walked out and a man went down in the parking lot is a deputy with a hearing, and I wanted to be the one asking questions, not answering them.

That is the first record I altered. The second one is on a tablet that belongs to an armored-car company. At 2:18 the driver came in for the restroom and set it on the counter beside my coffee. It said he'd arrived at 2:05. I changed it to 2:30. It took six seconds and I have had eleven hours to think about how easy it was.

Attachment two is why. It's my own phone. I took a screenshot of my own texts because I've spent eleven years telling people that the messages are the case. They are.

One more thing, and then I'll stop typing into a government computer. Mara's photo. The office door open at 2:14. That's my door. I opened it at 2:11 because a man in a truck had just told me there was no pickup tonight and something was wrong, and I wanted to see with my own eyes whether the bag was on the shelf. It wasn't. I left the door open and I went out the back to find your father. I didn't find him. Mara found the door.

Your father did not steal from himself. I've watched him for four years. I don't know where the money is. I know where it wasn't, and when, and who was standing in the lot when it wasn't there.

Don't reply to this address.

L.