She carried her lunch downstairs where she asked Lou for the evidence room keys and logged the time she entered the room on a clipboard that hung beside the door. She flipped a switch to the right of the door and the fifteen-foot-wide by forty-foot-long room slowly came to light under the flickering fluorescent bulbs. The floor was poured concrete, but the walls remained the rough red brick that covered the outside of the department and the Gun Club next door. At one time, evidence was kept upstairs, in a small locked room that was now used for the custodian’s cleaning supplies. When the amount of evidence grew too large for the small area, the alley between the two buildings was bricked up on either end and the space finished to house the growing number of objects and boxes of paperwork. The only access to the locked room was a door cut into the police station wall. Twenty-five feet of metal shelving units were attached to the brick on the Gun Club side. Otto had made wooden signs in his workshop at home and hung them from the top of the shelving units.
