I walked back to the Defender and wrote down, in the notebook I keep for meetings, everything I had seen, in order, in the plainest language I could manage.

That took nine minutes and it is the single most useful thing I did in the entire nineteen months that followed, and I did it because a lawyer told me eight years earlier, about something completely unrelated, that a contemporaneous note is worth ten times a memory.

And then I called Ruthanne Pyle.

Ruthanne is my firm’s general counsel.

She is sixty-one, she has been practicing for thirty-four years, and she has the most useful quality a person can have in a crisis, which is that her voice does not change.

I told her, standing in an industrial lot with the engine off, in about ninety seconds, exactly what I had seen.