Vera brought the verdict summary in a manila folder that looked older than the shoebox clipping, soft-cornered, carried from house to house for almost a decade. She set it on the workbench next to a disassembled wheel motor and told me to wash the grease off my hands first, which told me she wanted me actually reading it, not just nodding at it.
"August 2014," she said. "I was in that courtroom for most of it. Not every day, I couldn't afford every day, but enough."
The summary was two pages, dense, a reporter's recap of a jury's findings rather than the full record, but it matched what I'd since read elsewhere. A jury found Maren Kest guilty of racketeering and of involvement in eleven murders carried out through the Dockline syndicate over roughly a decade and a half of operation.
"Eleven," I said, mostly to hear the number out loud in that room instead of only on a page.
"Eleven that a jury could actually prove, in a courtroom, with evidence that held up," Vera said. "People like to say more. People say thirty, forty, whatever number makes a good headline. I've learned to only say eleven, because eleven is what we can stand behind without lying."
I asked which of the eleven was Dale.
She tapped a line on the second page, a case number, nothing more dramatic than that on paper, though I watched her jaw work while she pointed at it. "Right there. Dale Sennett. Nineteen years old. Wrong warehouse, wrong night, wrong people deciding he'd seen something he hadn't."
I didn't say I was sorry, because I'd said it before and it had never once made either of us feel like the sentence had done anything, but I let the silence hold the weight instead.
"I need you to understand something before you sign anything for that contract," Vera said. "I'm not angry because a famous criminal is dead. People die in custody, some of it's nobody's fault, some of it's exactly somebody's fault, and I don't actually need vengeance dressed up as justice to feel settled about Dale. I got my settling in 2014, in that courtroom, when they read eleven counts and I knew his name was one of them and the law said so, official and permanent."
"Then what is this about, for you?" I asked.
"It's about whether what you sign keeps that settling intact or quietly erodes it. If the Custody Service paperwork starts rewriting 2019 in a way that makes the whole story sound like just a scandal about a dead gangster, people forget the eleven were ever adjudicated at all. They just remember a mess. Dale deserves better than being footnoted into somebody else's scandal."
That reframed the stakes for me in a way the endorsement letter alone hadn't. I had been treating this as a private argument between my conscience and a contract clause. Vera was telling me it was also an argument about whose facts survived in the record, and that any document bearing my signature needed to protect the eleven counts as firmly as it questioned anything about the transfer.
"I can promise you that much," I said. "Whatever I end up signing or not signing, it won't touch the verdict. The eleven stay eleven."
Vera nodded once, like a technician confirming a torque spec had held, and slid the folder back into her bag. "Then we're square on what we're actually fighting about," she said. "Now let's go look at what you actually remember from that October."