“Grace for him,” I said. “Nothing for her.”

Chapter 6 — The Correct Time on the Correct Line

The case did not turn on me. I want that understood. It turned, as I have said before and will keep saying, on tired people writing correct times on correct lines.

Alina Boyce was twenty-four years old and had been an intake nurse at St. Mary’s for eleven months on the night my daughter came through those doors. She wore a cardigan to court and she was so frightened on the stand that Reyes had to ask her twice to speak up.

She testified that she logged a clear plastic belongings bag at 11:31 p.m. That the log was handwritten because the intake terminal had been down since the previous Thursday, a fact confirmed by the hospital’s IT ticket, which Reyes put into evidence, and which was the least dramatic exhibit in the entire trial.

That the bag contained keys, one cracked mobile telephone, one folded gas station receipt, and one piece of white cloth.

Tolliver went after her for an hour. He was gentle and relentless. He suggested the bag might have been contaminated. He suggested the fabric might have been added later.