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years in jail,” the chief said with an expression Casey couldn’t read.
    “This will be my first case for the Project, Chief Zarnazzi,” Casey said, “but I know that it doesn’t pursue just any case,
     only where there’s a high likelihood that concrete DNA evidence can exculpate our clients.”
    “Skull plate, what?” the chief asked.
    “Exculpate,” Casey said, “prove they’re innocent.”
    “Right.”
    “I can get court orders for the evidence if you need that,” Casey said. “As you probably know, it’s a statutory right in New
     York State, but it’s my understanding that most police forces work pretty cooperatively with the Project, based on its reputation.”
    “Oh, of course,” the chief said. “You don’t need anything more than Marty here to vouch for you.”
    Marty bobbed his head vigorously.
    “Happy to help,” the chief said. “Just a little old-fashioned is all. We’ve got a warehouse out on State Street. Marty knows.
     Sergeant Stittle is my man out there and he’ll give you all you need. I’ll call him to make sure. When’s good?”
    Casey looked over at Marty and smiled. “Right now would work.”
    The chief slapped his hands on the face of his desk and rose up to show them the door. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss
     Jordan. I didn’t see it, but Marty tells me they made a movie about you.”
    Casey glanced at the young lawyer, who blushed again and studied his shoes.
    “It was a couple years ago,” Casey said, “and you know how they twist things around.”
    “Right,” the chief said as they left him. “Of course, no one ever made a movie about anybody I know.”
    _________
    The Auburn police stored their evidence in an old concrete warehouse that had once been the endpoint for a railroad spur.
     A crumbling factory, sheathed in undergrowth, rose up beyond the warehouse, and Casey could only just make out where the old
     tracks lay in their bed of waist-high weeds. A rusted chain-link fence surrounded the place, but the gates hung wide open
     at angles that spoke of their disuse. Three vehicles, one of them a police cruiser with its trunk open, sat parked in the
     back of the building beneath a loading dock with a dozen tractor trailer–size garage doors.
    Casey mounted the steps with Marty in tow, knocked on a green metal door she presumed was the office, then walked right in.
     Three men in uniform looked up from a card table positioned beneath a naked bulb. Monopoly pieces lay scattered about a board.
     One of the men, hugely fat with sweat on his cherry brow despite the damp coolness, wiped his face on a sleeve and rose up,
     huffing with the effort. In one hand were two orange five-hundred-dollar bills.
    “Can I help you?” he asked, scowling.
    “Chief Zarnazzi sent us. I’m Casey Jordan.”
    “Oh,” the fat man said, his face falling, “I thought Casey was a guy. I’m Sergeant Stittle.”
    Casey looked down at herself and held up both hands. “We’re here to get the evidence.”
    “We got plenty of that,” the sergeant said, his mouth a slit in the dough of his blank face.
    Casey glanced at Marty and said, “From the Hubbard case. Dwayne Hubbard.”
    The big man scratched his head while his two cop buddies smirked at him.
    “You got an index number for that?”
    “Didn’t your chief just call you?”
    “Said some Casey guy was coming and to help him out,” the sergeant said. “Happy to give you what you need, but you got to
     tell me what you need.”
    “Don’t you have this stuff listed by case name?” she asked, angling her head toward the yawning doorway that opened into the
     bowels of the warehouse, where row after row of boxes rested on shelves stretching to the twenty-foot ceiling.
    “Sure, what year?” the sergeant asked.
    “Nineteen eighty-nine,” Casey said.
    Sergeant Stittle sighed and nodded at a metal shelf jammed with heavy white three-ring binders. “In there, you could find
     something by the name, but it ain’t