Hold Music
Episode 3 of 3 of Room Tone by Erin Castellano
Hold music for nine minutes, and then a woman in records picked up and said Lundgren had stepped out and did I want his voicemail. I said I would email. I have never met her either.
Then I sat down and did the part I had been circling for a week.
I cut the three minutes and eleven seconds out of KC-23-0902 and laid it against KC-23-1140, then KC-24-0219, then KC-24-0771. It fit all three to the sample. Same grass, same posts, same far-off laugh at the same offset from every restart, nineteen restarts in the sixty-one minute Deming file and twenty in the long one. At one restart in the Deming interview a woman was saying the word please, and the hallway laugh arrived on top of her, and it arrived in the same place it arrived in an arson interview six months later.
Every produced file in this county carries a custodian certification on the notice page. One line, one signature block. On all three of mine it was Sergeant Lowell Kittredge, Technical Services, the man who owned the recorders, the rooms, and the keys.
In 2022 the appellate court reversed State v. Rakes because a recorder in Room Two never started and a confession went away with it. Kittredge’s recorder. Kittredge’s name in the opinion, twice. After Rakes the county went under a standing discovery order: produce the audio, all of it, any custodial interview, on request, indefinitely.
So. He had the rooms, he signed the certifications, and he had a reversal with his name on it.
I wrote it up. Four pages, file names, timestamps, offsets, the 3:11, the two noise floors, the men who did not breathe. I addressed it to the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission, which can take a prosecutor’s license, and I did not send it, because I wanted one clean pass first, and because a woman who has never met anybody ought to be careful about naming a man.
I made coffee. Charlene called and I said no, no crimes solved, and let her get through the weather and her neighbor’s fence.
Then I went back and broke clean-ear.
I opened my own 2023 transcript of KC-23-1140 and read it against the audio the county had paid me one fifteen a minute to type a second time.
It matched. Word for word, false start for false start, um for um, across sixty-four minutes. That does not happen. Two transcriptionists never match. One transcriptionist, twice, three years apart, does not match herself.
At 00:51:40, Halvorsen’s voice asked, “Whose truck was that, the gray one?”
There is no gray truck. There never was. That truck was green, and I typed gray in 2023, and I emailed a corrected page fourteen nobody ever answered.
And at 00:52:14, where my old pages read inaudible, the new audio held two clean seconds of room tone. An empty hole exactly where I had once failed to hear something.
The audio was built from my transcript. My mistake was in it. So was my deafness.
Here is what it cost to be that stupid on purpose. In April of 2024 the county moved its evidence storage to a new vendor and a little over four hundred hours of interview audio did not come across. None of it did. Under the Rakes order that audio was producible on demand in more than sixty cases, most of them closed on pleas. Disclosing the loss would have opened every one of those pleas, cost the county checks it did not have, and cost the office the compliance certification that pays half its grant money. Rebuilding was cheaper. The detectives were the easy half, because hundreds of clean hours of them survived in other cases that did come across. The defendants had to be built off the jail phone system, a different vendor and a worse one, which is why their voices carried sand and the detectives’ carried nothing. A model read both sides back off my pages, one clean stretch of Room Two ran underneath so the whole thing sounded like a room instead of a file, and it went out to a contractor to be typed fresh, clean-ear, so a certified transcript would come back, sit on top, and make it evidence.
Kittredge had recorders. He did not have transcripts.
Transcripts went out and came back through one desk. The man at that desk raised my rate, paid a five-year-old debt with interest, closed my archive, sent my Tuesdays, and signed off every single time, Appreciate you.
I did not mail anything. The certification page is the last sheet in every file I hand back, one line above my name, saying the transcript is a true and complete record of the recording provided. I retyped that page for KC-23-1140. I struck the line and typed in its place the June 2023 file name, the offsets, and one sentence saying the recording provided was not a recording. I attached the four pages and a fifth about a green truck and uploaded all of it to the portal, where defense counsel pulls discovery and nobody takes anything back without a docket entry.
Tuesday’s batch arrived on schedule. Six files, two hundred twelve audio minutes.
I did not open them.