CHAPTER 3: THE FIRST REPORT
Officer Lena Ortiz arrived twenty-two minutes after I called the nonemergency line.
She took photographs from several angles and asked whether I had argued with Patricia before the incident.
“About my mailbox,” I said.
“Anything else?”
“Not until she mentioned my father.”
Ortiz wrote down Patricia’s exact words.
She also asked me to leave the damaged box in place until the postal inspector could advise whether any mail had been disturbed.
I showed her the small piece of white paper I had found beneath the broken door.
It was a corner torn from an envelope with the last three letters of a name visible.
The letters were R-E-N.
Ortiz slipped it into a paper evidence envelope without promising it meant anything.
“What exactly did she take?” Ortiz asked.
“I couldn’t see it clearly.”
“Don’t guess for the report.”
I appreciated that instruction more than I expected.
I had spent twenty-two years guessing about Laurel.
It had never helped.
Patricia opened her front door when Ortiz knocked.
She came outside without the hammer and said she had lost her temper over a neighborhood eyesore.
“That mailbox is hazardous,” she insisted.
“The door sticks out over the sidewalk.”
Ortiz pointed to the splintered post.
“You made it hazardous today.
”
Patricia said she would pay for a replacement.
When Ortiz asked about the paper in her hand, she replied that it had been a grocery receipt.
“Did you put the receipt in Mr. Mercer’s mailbox?” Ortiz asked.
Patricia hesitated.
“I dropped it there by accident.”
“Why were you reaching inside?”
“I was cleaning up the mess.”
Ortiz did not argue.
She asked Patricia to preserve any receipts or documents connected to the incident.
Then she returned to my porch and gave me a case number.
“This is criminal damage, and we are documenting the possibility of mail interference,” she said.
“That does not mean we have proved a second offense.”
I thanked her.
After she drove away, I noticed Patricia watching from behind her front curtain.
Her expression suggested that the ruined mailbox was not the worst thing she expected to happen that day.
