The Route 9 Report

The PI's second report on the Route 9 facility took longer than the first.

"We had to go twice," Diane said. "First time, the manager was not there. Second time, we got the records." She was professional, direct, the way she always was. "The unit has been in Ellen Marsh's name since 2008. Paid up through 2019. After that, it went month-to-month on a card that is in your brother's name."

Gavin. Her brother had been paying for a storage unit in their dead mother's name for years.

"Has anyone been accessing it?"

"Records show one visit in the last twelve months. November. Early November." Diane paused. "A man matching Drake Marsh's description."

Liza closed her eyes. She thought about Drake going to a storage unit their mother had leased, in a town eight miles from where Liza lived, months after the permanent order was issued. She thought about what he was doing there. What he was looking for.

"I need to know what is in that unit," she said.

"We can request the access records. We can ask the facility manager. But if your brother is the one on the card, he may have a right to limit what we see."

Gavin. She needed to talk to Gavin. But she also needed to wait, because she understood that what she knew now was different from what she could prove, and the distance between those two things was where people like Drake lived.

She went home and updated the evidence log. She wrote the date and time and Diane's name and she described what Drake had been seen doing at a storage unit in a town eight miles from her apartment, and she did not write I think he knows something, because she did not know that yet, and she was not going to write things she could not prove.