The letter came on agency letterhead I didn't recognize, which was its own small violence after sixteen years of knowing every department's logo by heart. Florida State Investigations Bureau was assuming jurisdiction. A new name, a new case number, a new person to explain my brother to from the beginning.
Pilar Sennet introduced herself over the phone before we ever met in person, her voice unhurried in a way I'd learned to be suspicious of, because unhurried people had told me things before that cost me sleep for a week. She asked if I had anything from the original file years that hadn't made it into prior interviews.
I thought of the ledger before I thought of anything else. In 2006, Dovell Corliss had serviced a dozen properties within walking distance of where that car was found, and I'd kept a private list of workers, assignments and contact details. Some numbers had gone dead. Other entries I'd updated when ordinary business correspondence supplied a newer address. Before taking it to Pilar, I separated those later details from the original job dates, drawing a line down each page so nobody would mistake an address learned in 2022 for proof of where a man had lived in 2006. The distinction looked obvious on paper. I wished I'd always kept it as clear in my head.
"I want to be straight with you," I told Pilar when I brought it to her office, a manila folder heavier than it looked. "I can't connect any of these men to that car. I never could. I just kept thinking somebody on this list walked near that lot once, and maybe that matters, and maybe it never did."
She read through it without comment for longer than I was comfortable with. "This is useful," she finally said, "as a reference. I want to be clear it's not an identification of anybody, and I won't be treating it as one." I told her I understood. I wasn't sure, even then, that I fully did.
I asked her what more than fifteen years of looking had turned up that I hadn't already heard. She told me what she could, which wasn't much, careful phrasing about ongoing review, about evidence being revisited with methods that hadn't existed in 2006. No names. No theories. I'd learned by then not to ask twice.
Back at the shop, Wade wanted to know how it went, and I told him most of it, the ledger, Pilar's caution, the particular loneliness of starting over with a stranger who hadn't lived any of the last sixteen years with me. He listened the way he always had, steady, present, the business partner who'd never once made me feel like a burden for needing him.
I made a duplicate of the ledger before I left Pilar's office that afternoon, an old habit from running a business where paper went missing if you didn't protect it. I meant to keep it somewhere private. Instead, rushing between a job and a dentist appointment I'd rescheduled twice already, I slid it into the shared filing cabinet in our office, the one Wade and I both had keys to, telling myself I'd move it later.
I didn't move it later. Weeks turned into months while jobs needed measuring and customers wanted dates I could promise to keep. Once, opening the cabinet for an insurance form, I saw the folder and put two fingers on its edge. The phone rang before I pulled it out. I shut the drawer to answer a question about a sticking latch, and afterward I forgot again. The original assignments were sixteen years old now; the newer contact details made the pages look more useful than their connection to Ellis had ever justified.
It would be four more years before I understood what it meant, leaving that duplicate where Wade could reach it. At the time, it felt like nothing. A copy of a list nobody wanted, filed away in a cabinet in a shop that still, somehow, after everything, needed both of us to keep its doors open.