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The AUSA writes it down. Torres doesn't reach for her own pen yet.
"Before we start," she says. "Did anyone pressure you to come in tonight? Anyone at all."
"No. She followed me because I told her to, but the decision to come in was mine and mine alone."
Torres holds my eyes long enough to be sure, then nods at the AUSA, and his pen catches up. I start talking, and I begin with Neil, because everything else grew out of him.
Torres folds her arms. “Start with the first time Vogt put something in your hands.”
“Behind the chutes in Lubbock. Morning slack.” I look at the recorder between us. Its red light stays steady. “He gave me a padded envelope and told me which trailer it went in.”
“What was inside?” the AUSA asks.
“I didn’t open it.”
“Why did you carry it?”
“Because Neil knew what my parole could survive and what it couldn’t.”
The AUSA’s pen stops. “What did he say?”
“He didn’t have to say much.” I lean back in the chair. “He showed me a violation report with my name already typed on it, waiting for somebody to file it. Then he played me a voicemail he hadn’t sent yet.”
“To whom?”
“My parole officer.”
Torres’s expression doesn’t change. “Kessinger?”
“Yeah. After that, Neil started leaving his name in messages. Sometimes that was the whole message. ‘Kessinger.’ Then a date. The date kept getting closer whenever I asked questions.”
The AUSA writes that down. “Describe the envelope.”
“Sealed. Compliance routing code printed across the front. S.H. stamped in the corner.”
“One envelope?”
“All of them.”
“How many?”
“I stopped counting after the first few months.”
“Estimate.”
“Two or three a month. More during the summer run.”
Torres pulls a circuit map across the table and turns it toward me. “Show me the handoffs.”
I put my finger on Lubbock. “First one went into a compartment under the living quarters in a gooseneck.”
My finger moves west.
“Prescott. Tack room behind the timed-event pens.”
South again.
“Las Cruces. Between two stock trailers beside the east pens. Neil liked that spot because the floodlights didn’t reach it.”
