Chapter 5 - The Maintenance Log
The next morning, Mara found her name written in blue marker on the operations board beneath the words ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW.
Leonard Pike had arrived before her. He stood in the dispatch office with his coat still buttoned, one hand resting on a stack of forms. Behind him, the wall clock made a dry electric click each time the second hand moved.
“You’re early,” Mara said.
“You’re late.”
She looked at the clock. “I’m seven minutes early.”
“For your route. Not for this.”
Pike slid the forms toward her. They concerned the bus-stop incident, the viral recording, her refusal of service, and an alleged failure to follow passenger-assistance procedures.
Mara read the last page twice. “You wrote this?”
“I reviewed it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the corner of his tie. “The authority needs a clean account.”
“The account is that three teenagers harassed an old man and I stopped them.”
“The account is that a public employee became part of a confrontation now being investigated by the police.”
“Was the camera investigated?”
His fingers paused on the glasses.
“What camera?”
“The one above my windshield.”
“You said it recorded everything.”
“I said that to make three boys leave.”
“Then don’t repeat it in writing.”
Mara turned to the window. The buses waited beyond the glass, red sides dull under the morning rain. “Why was the camera off?”
“It wasn’t.”
“The system log says otherwise.”
Pike’s expression did not change, but the skin beneath his left eye tightened.
“You’ve seen the system log?”
“I know how to read a maintenance report.”
“You drive a bus.”
“And you supervise the people who maintain them.”
“Sign the statement.”
“No.”
The word sat between them with less force than she expected. Pike looked tired rather than angry. That made him more difficult to read.
“Mara,” he said, “you did something decent. Don’t let the internet turn it into something dangerous.”
“Dangerous for whom?”
He put his glasses back on. “Go home.”
She took a photograph of the forms with her phone before leaving. At the maintenance office, she stopped beside the printer and asked the clerk for the camera report. The clerk, a young man named Arturo, looked toward the supervisor’s window before answering.
“It’s restricted.”
“I’m the driver assigned to the bus.”
“You’re restricted too.”
Mara smiled without warmth. “Then give me the page you’re allowed to give me.”
Arturo printed a single sheet. The bus camera had been disabled at 6:02 p.m., fifteen minutes before Mara reached Hawthorn and Bell. The authorization came from a maintenance credential belonging to Calvin Sloane.
Sloane’s name appeared beneath a work order for a faulty exterior light.
Mara folded the page into her pocket.
At home, Nia was asleep on the couch with the television muted. The public clip played in a loop, Mara’s face frozen in the reflection of the bus window. A dozen news channels had used the same five seconds of footage.
Mara turned the television off.
Nia opened one eye. “You’re suspended?”
“Not yet.”
“That means maybe.”
“It means someone used a lot of paper to avoid saying what they mean.”
Nia sat up. “I found something.”
She handed Mara the phone. The video file showed a thin gray line at the beginning and an unusual jump in the sound wave. Nia had opened it in an editing program.
“The eleven seconds weren’t cut from the public copy,” she said. “They were replaced. Someone took the original file and exported a new one.”
“Can you recover them?”
“Not from this copy.”
“Can you tell who made it?”
“Maybe. The file was uploaded from a phone, but the metadata got stripped. The audio still has a second track under the bus noise.”
Mara heard it when Nia played the clip. A faint metallic knock. Then a man’s voice, too blurred to understand.
“Talia had the original,” Mara said.
Nia looked up. “The girl in the yellow coat?”
“I think so.”
“You think?”
Mara remembered the girl looking back as the bus pulled away, her face pale beneath the rain. “She told Elias to call someone. Maybe she was trying to help.”
“Or maybe she was the one who cut it.”
The thought had already occurred to Mara.
That afternoon, she found Elias sitting beneath the awning of the closed library. His cane rested across his knees. He seemed to have been waiting for her, though he did not look surprised when she arrived.
“You were followed,” he said.
Mara glanced behind her. A delivery van idled at the curb.
“By whom?”
“That depends on who paid for the van.”
She handed him the maintenance report.
He read the name and closed his eyes.
“Calvin Sloane,” he said.
“You know him?”
“He worked the Northline project.”
“As what?”
“Transit maintenance, after the station opened. Before that, he was a night foreman for Calder Meridian.”
“Why would he disable my camera?”
“To create eleven seconds.”
Mara sat beside him. Rain ticked against the awning like fingernails.
“What did he take?”
Elias’s hand tightened around the cane. “An archive key.”
“You said the duplicate was the key to the locker.”
“The brass key opens the locker. The archive key opens a room behind it.”
“And you had both?”
“I had one.”
“Which one?”
“The brass key.”
“Then Sloane took the other.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were already involved.”
Mara looked at him. “I was involved when you let three teenagers use me as a distraction?”
“I did not arrange that.”
“You knew someone was coming.”
“I knew someone wanted the key. I did not know how far they would go.”
She stood. “That distinction may comfort you. It doesn’t comfort me.”
Elias looked toward the street. “The archive room contains June’s recorder.”
“I thought the tapes were the evidence.”
“The tapes are copies.”
“Copies of what?”
“The part people will deny.”
Across the street, the delivery van pulled away. Mara watched it disappear between the wet buildings.
“Who is Calvin Sloane working for?” she asked.
Elias turned the maintenance report over in his hands. “That is the question you should ask Pike.”
May you like
Mara felt the old photograph in her bag, its edges pressing against the lining.
“I intend to.”
