Chapter 10: What the Record Built
Grace had the call logged as attempted witness intimidation by Friday morning.
It went into the file alongside everything else.
The state attorney's office noted it without comment, which Grace said was a good sign — it meant they were already treating Hale as a subject, not a bystander.
The judicial conduct board suspended Hale from active cases pending review on the following Monday.
It was not announced publicly.
Grace found out through a contact inside the board and called me while I was at work.
"He's off the bench," she said.
I was standing in the break room.
I set down my coffee.
"Temporarily?"
"For now.
But the criminal referral is moving.
The attorney's office has subpoenaed his vehicle records going back five years.
Insurance.
Maintenance logs.
Traffic camera footage from the county road system."
"Will they find anything?"
"They already have.
A toll camera on the county line road captured a vehicle matching the description and plate forty minutes after Paul Greer's accident.
The image is partial but the plate is readable."
I sat down.
"That's him."
"That's the car," Grace said carefully.
"The investigation will establish the rest."
"How long?"
"These things move slowly.
But they move." A pause.
"I want you to be prepared for the fact that his attorney will make this uncomfortable before it concludes.
There will be statements.
There may be press.
He will try to reframe the narrative."
"Let him try."
"I know," Grace said.
"I just want you to be ready."
I was ready.
I had been ready since the morning I found a police report in a tuxedo pocket and screamed in a hotel room while my new husband came running.
What I hadn't been ready for was what came three weeks later.
A letter.
Delivered to our apartment.
No return address.
Inside, a single sheet of paper with twelve lines of handwriting I didn't recognize.
I read it standing in the hallway with my coat still on.
Then I sat down on the floor.
Richard found me there when he came home twenty minutes later.
"What happened?" He crouched beside me.
"Are you hurt?"
I handed him the letter.
He read it.
His face went through several things in quick succession.
"Who sent this?" he said.
"I don't know."
He read it again.
The letter was from a woman who said she had been in Carter Hale's courtroom eight years ago.
She had been a defendant in a civil case — a minor property dispute.
She said Hale had called her into his chambers before the ruling and told her that the outcome of her case depended on her silence about something she had witnessed in a parking garage the previous year.
She had stayed silent.
She had won her case.
She had carried it ever since.
She had seen Grace's name in a legal journal article and had spent three weeks deciding whether to write.
At the bottom of the letter, she had written her name and a phone number.
Richard looked up from the page.
"There's a fourth one," he said quietly.
May you like
"Call Grace," I said.
He was already reaching for his phone.
