Vendors, reporters, and county officials packed the hall as I stepped through the entrance, and the sheriff’s deputy who’d worked the case asked the board if he could go first.
Nobody broke into that ticket office. That is what he opened with.
The door had been pried at from the outside, and it looked good enough in a photograph, but the frame was splintered outward and the strike plate was intact, and any deputy who has worked more than a year knows what that means. Somebody staged it after the fact.
And the alarm never went off, because the alarm was disarmed at 11:52 that night with a valid code and armed again at 12:31.
Those panels keep a log. Every code has its own user number, and the log prints out on a little roll of paper inside the box like a cash register receipt, and it had been sitting in that box the whole time while a man told the newspaper the fairgrounds had a security problem.
User 14. Not mine — mine is user 3 and has been since they put the system in.
User 14 was issued in March to the fair director’s office assistant. She has since told the sheriff a great deal about who asked her for that code and what he told her it was for.
Here is the part that had the room quiet. The ticket office had a bad August. The fair came in eleven thousand dollars under what that director had promised the board it would do, and there is an audit every fall, and a robbery is the oldest way in the world to explain a hole in a drawer.
He is charged. That is all I will say about it, because it goes in front of a judge in the fall and I am not going to be the man who tries it in a fairgrounds hall.
Then the deputy said the other thing, which I did not ask for.
He read from the incident report, from the section where he interviewed the grounds crew about who had access.
Every person interviewed, without exception, named the same man as the one they trusted with the keys, and three of them asked whether they could sit down before they answered, because they were angry on his behalf.
Three of them asked whether they could sit down. I have known some of those men thirty years and I did not know that about any of them.
The board voted me back that night with pay. The 4-H parents had a sign made for the main gate over the winter and would not let me see it until March, and it says GATES OPEN BEFORE DAYLIGHT SINCE 1997 with my name on it, and I have asked twice to have it taken down.
Nobody’s taking it down. I unlock at four-forty. Same as always.