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The Upright Boot: Why a Standing Shoe Haunted a Burned Depot · Mystery Stories and Unsolved Cases

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 6.22 in the morning, November 14th, 2001. Nicole Anderson was
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: running a snowplow route on Delacroix Street when she saw
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: it through the windshield. A work boot, size 11, standing
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: upright on the sidewalk across from a burned-out building. Right
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: foot only, laces double-knotted, tongue folded neatly down, dry, despite
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: the overnight sleet that had soaked everything around it. The
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: building behind it was a ruin. Fires happen. What stopped
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Anderson was not the ruin. Officer Dana Pruitt arrived within
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: minutes and photographed the boot before anyone touched it. It
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: sat 40 feet from the nearest scorched brick. No heat damage,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: no ash, no moisture. The sleet had been steady since
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: before midnight, and that boot looked like someone had set
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: it there that same morning, walked away, and left it
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: for someone to find. Investigators would spend four days on
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: that site. They would rule the fire accidental. They would
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: photograph the boot, log it, label it, unrelated, and file
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: it in an evidence box. It would stay there for
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: almost 19 years. The question nobody pressed, the question that
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Photograph had been quietly asking for nearly two decades, is
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: the question at the center of this story. If no
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: explosion threw that boot there, if the sleet never touched it,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: If the man who died inside was found wearing his
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: own boots with his remains, then whose boot is it?
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: And why is it standing upright? To understand it, we
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: must go back in time, before the boot, before the fire,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: to the life of Jerry Riley. Before the fire, before
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: the boot, before any of it, there was Jerry Riley
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: getting up on Prospect Hill and timing his walk to work.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Jerry was 24, second of three children, His father had
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: left when he was nine, and he and his siblings
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: had grown up with their mother, Connie, in the kind
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: of household where things were taken seriously because they had
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: to be. Jerry had completed a two-year trade program, then
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: landed a position at Larkin Heating Supply on Delacroix Street.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: He had worked there for two years. He knew the
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: depot's inventory the way he knew his walk, precisely. He
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: timed that walk. 41 minutes, Prospect Hill, to the depot.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: He had a landmark, the water tower on Foundry Row,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and he allowed himself to feel the day had properly
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: started when he passed it. He carried a steel thermos,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: the same brand he had used since high school. He
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: was saving money toward a welding certification course, the next
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: step in what he had laid out for himself. His girlfriend,
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Tina Marsh, would later say he had seemed distracted the
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: week before the fire. She could not say why. His
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: co-worker Pete DeLuca had known him well enough to tease
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: him about the logs. The logs were a running joke
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: between them. The drum inventory records for the rear storage room,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: where the heating oil drones were kept, had been piling
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: up for two weeks. DeLuca kept telling Jerry to get
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: them done. Jerry kept putting it off. On the evening
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: of November 13, 2001, Jerry told DeLuca he was staying
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: late to finally deal with them. DeLuca left at five
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: in the afternoon. He did not think twice about it.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Jerry was organized. Jerry would handle it, lock up, and
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: walk home past the water tower in the dark. The
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: depot on Delacroix Street detonated at 7.49 that evening. Jerry
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: Riley's remains were recovered from the collapsed rear storage room,
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: the same room where the drums were kept, where he
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: had gone to finish what he'd been putting off The
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: fire was ruled accidental. The department responded, contained it, filed it.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Connie Riley received a condolence letter. She put Jerry's steel
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: thermos on the kitchen windowsill, and there it stayed. There
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: is something specific about that thermos. It is not a symbol.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: It is just an object a 24-year-old carried every morning
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: on a 41-minute walk. He had timed down to the minute.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Connie put it in the window. Because she did not
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: know what else to do with it, she would not
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: move it for almost 19 years. That is the weight
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: of an accidental fire. A ruled cause that closes the file,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: ends the inquiry, and leaves a thermos in a window
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: with nowhere to go. But there was a boot on
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: the sidewalk that nobody could explain. And that boot had
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: not finished asking its question. The truth of that boot
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: and the Delacroix street fire would take nearly two decades
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: to reveal itself. the fire marshal's office assigned Chief Investigator
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Don Sewell to the Delacroix Street Depot. He and his
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: team spent four days on the site. On November 20, 2001,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Sewell filed his ruling. Accidental ignition. Four days. One ruling.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Case closed. But the file contained something Sewell did not elevate.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Buried in the metallurgical section of the report, a forensic
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: specialist noted that the coupling on drum 3 had not
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: failed the way old metal fails. Stress fractures propagate from
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: a single point. They follow the grain. This failure was circumferential.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: A clean, full-diameter separation, all the way round the fitting.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: The specialist noted, in a subordinate clause, that the pattern
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: was more consistent with deliberate loosening than with age-related fatigue.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Sowell read the report. He requested no further analysis. The
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: clause stayed where it was, Subordinate, nested, invisible to anyone
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: who did not read slowly. The boot, meanwhile, had been photographed, bagged,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: and filed. Officer Dana Pruitt had taken the photograph before
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: anyone touched it. The image was precise, right foot only,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: laces double knotted, tongue folded, standing upright on wet concrete,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: 40 feet from the nearest scorched brick. Sewell's team confirmed
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: it was not Jerry Riley's boot. Jerry had worn insulated
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: work boots. Both were recovered with his remains. So the
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: boot in the evidence photograph had belonged to someone else,
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: someone present at the scene, someone whose identity Sewell declined
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: to pursue. The explanation offered in the file was a
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: vagrant hypothesis. The boot had likely been on the sidewalk
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: before the fire and had simply survived the night. This
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: required the boot to have survived eight hours of overnight
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: sleet without absorbing a drop of moisture. The file did
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: not address that requirement. It moved on. Two anomalies. One
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: buried in a clause. One filed and labeled unrelated. The
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: case closed around them like water closing over a stone.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: There was a third anomaly. It never reached the file
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: at all. Pete DeLuca had been the last person to
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: see Jerry Riley alive. He left the depot at five
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: in the afternoon on November 13th. Before he drove out
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: of the lot, he noticed a truck parked at the
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: side entrance, the entrance that led directly to the storage
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: room corridor. The truck had a magnetic sign on its door,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Mid-State Appliance Service. DeLuca assumed it was a service call
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: he had not been told about. He did not write
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: it down. He did not mention it to the fire
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: marshal's investigators. He assumed... Reasonably, that someone had already taken
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: his account. No one had. He did mention it once,
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: at Jerry Riley's funeral. Standing near the back, he told
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Connie Riley that he had seen a repair truck at
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: the side entrance that afternoon. Connie was burying her son.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: She had no way to know what to do with
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: that information. Neither did Pete DeLuca, who would carry the
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: detail for almost 19 years before a detective finally asked
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: him the right question. So the file was closed, the
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: boot was boxed, the coupling fragment was cataloged, and the
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: truck was never mentioned to anyone with the authority to
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: act on it. Jerry Riley had died in a building
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: full of heating oil drums, and the explanation on record
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: was an accident. The evidence that contradicted that explanation sat
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: in three separate places, none of which spoke to the others.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Almost 19 years passed. In early March of 2020, A
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: man named Howard Goetsch was admitted to Mercy General Hospital.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: He was 61 years old. He had spent eight years
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: on the crew at Station 4 before leaving the department.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: His attending physician assessed approximately six weeks remaining. Goetsch asked
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: for a legal aid. What he dictated was a formal statement,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: witnessed and notarized. In late winter of 2003, on a
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: hunting trip, Lewis had been drinking. He told Goetze he
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: had set the Delacroix Street fire to settle a debt.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: He said a kid had been inside and he hadn't
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: known it. Goetze had sat with that for 17 years.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: He died on April 2, 2020. The statement was transmitted
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: to Millhaven PD. Detective Ralph Dalton received it. Dalton was 44,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: 12 years in major crimes, assigned to a cold case
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: review initiative funded by a state grant. His reputation was specific.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: He built cases without leaks, and he built them slowly.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: He pulled the original fire marshal file within a week
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: of receiving Goetsch's statement. Within two weeks, he had found
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: all three anomalies. The circumferential coupling separation, the boot, photographed
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: and filed as unrelated. And then Pete DeLuca... still living,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: still carrying the truck detail in his memory, still assuming
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: someone had taken his account in 2001. Dalton was the
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: first investigator to formally record what DeLuca had seen. The
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: three anomalies had been isolated for almost 19 years. Dalton
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: did not find them separately. He found them as a system.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Each one pointed at the same gap, in the same night.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: The circumferential coupling failure said the fire had been engineered.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: The boot said someone had been inside who was not
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Jerry Riley. The truck said that person had arrived under
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: a false pretext, through a side entrance, directly to the
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: storage room. Three separate silences. One shape underneath all of them.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Dalton requested reanalysis of the boot through the state crime lab.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: TouchDNA techniques had not existed in 2001. They existed now.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: The results came back in August of 2020. Picture the
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: storage room corridor on the afternoon of November 13th, 2001.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: A man in work clothes pulls a truck to the
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: side entrance. He has a handwritten work order in his
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: receipt book. A boiler pressure check at the foundry row
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: address that matches the depot's building number. No one at
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: the depot had requested a boiler inspection. The work order
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: is a prop. He moves through the corridor to drum three.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: He loosens the valve coupling. He does not remove it.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: He rotates it just enough. Circumferential, clean, deliberate, so that
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: pressure will do the rest. Slowly, over hours. Then he
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: clips a modified electrical timer to a section of frayed
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: fixture wiring near the ceiling. The timer is set. He
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: walks out. At the side entrance, he removes his right boot.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: He has stepped in heating oil. He does not want
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: oil tracked into his vehicle. He sets the boot on
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: the sidewalk across the street, neatly, out of instinct. Laces
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: double knotted, tongue folded, and changes into a clean pair
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: from his truck. He drives away. Sleet has not started yet.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: It will start later, and it will fall all night,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: and the boot will sit exactly where he left it,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: perfectly dry. because he placed it after the last dry
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: window of the evening. He believed the building was empty.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: He had watched DeLuca leave. He had not stayed long
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: enough to see whether anyone else remained. Jerry Riley was
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: still inside. Now consider a different version of that afternoon.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: The one that looked obvious for almost 19 years. A
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: failing building, old equipment, a coupling under decades of pressure stress.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: a boot that had been sitting on that sidewalk before
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: the fire, belonging to no one anyone could identify, surviving
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: the sleet by chance or by shelter. This was the
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: version Sowell filed. It required a coincidence at every turn,
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: but coincidences happen, and accidental fires happen, and without someone
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: connecting the three pieces, the coincidences held, but that version
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: collapses the moment you look at the coupling geometry. A
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: stress fracture does not run all the way around a fitting.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Physics does not permit it. The metallurgist said so in
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: a clause no one elevated. And the version collapses again
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: when you put DeLuca's truck siding next to the fake
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: work order that spent almost 19 years in Lewis's garage.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: And it collapses a final time when you understand that
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: the boot, dry, upright, 40 feet from scorched brick, was
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: not surviving the sleet by luck. It was placed before
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: the sleep began, by someone who had just been inside
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: that building. The evidence that convicted Bruce Lewis had been
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: present at the scene within hours of the fire. It
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: had been photographed. It had been bagged. It had sat
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: in an evidence box for almost 19 years. What changed
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: in 2020 was not the evidence. What changed was that
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: a dying man finally said a name out loud, and
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: the detective pulled the right files. and the laboratory ran
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: a test that had not existed when the photograph was taken.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: The DNA from the boot's interior liner matched Bruce Lewis.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: His DNA was on file for mandatory department submission. He
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: had been the crew leader on the first unit to
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: respond to the Delacroix Street fire on the night of
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: November 13th, 2001. He had walked through the ruin he
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: had built in a different pair of boots, in a
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: different pair of boots, and filed it as an accident.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Lewis was 57 years old, retired, living in a lake
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: community 40 miles north of Millhaven, when Dalton arrested him
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: in September of 2020. He denied everything for 11 days.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: Then his cellmate, Owen Scarfe, reported what Lewis had said
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: in private. The DNA was going to bury him, and
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: he had never meant for anyone to die. A cooperation
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: agreement was brokered. In October of 2020, Lewis gave a
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: formal confession. He confirmed the fake service call, the loosened coupling,
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: the modified timer. He confirmed he had believed the building
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: was empty. He did not offer that belief as an excuse.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: He said it anyway. There is one detail in that
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: confession that recontextualizes everything that came before it. Lewis did
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: not leave the boot behind carelessly. He set it upright.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: He tied the laces. He folded the tongue. It was
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: a small automatic act. The kind of thing a person
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: does without thinking from years of habit, from a professional
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: life built on precision and steadiness. Captain Ed Farrow had
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: called him steady under pressure. His colleagues trusted him. His
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: crew followed him into burning buildings. That same precision, the
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: habit of leaving things ordered, left a size 11 work
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: boot standing upright on a public sidewalk for almost 19 years.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: waiting for a laboratory technique that did not yet exist.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: The trial opened in February of 2022. Connie Riley attended
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: every day. She was 71 years old. She had waited
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: 20 years for a courtroom to say what she had
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: never stopped believing, that her son had not died by accident.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: She sat through the testimony about the coupling. She sat
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: through the forensic reconstruction of the ignition device. She sat
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: through Lewis's own words. read into the record from his
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: October confession, explaining how he had accessed the building, which
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: drum he had targeted, how he had set the timer.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all three counts,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: second-degree murder, arson in the first degree, evidence tampering. The
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: judge sentenced Lewis to 32 years. But something else emerged
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: during the sentencing phase, something that changed the shape of
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: the entire case. Prosecutors presented a secondary DNA match. The
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: same partial profile recovered from the booth's interior liner had
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: been found on a window latch at a commercial fire
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: in Kellerton, 18 miles from Millhaven, in November of 1998,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: three years before Delacroix Street. That fire had destroyed a
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: machine shop. A night watchman named Al Brent had been inside.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: He survived, but the hearing loss he suffered was permanent.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Milhaven's fire had been ruled accidental in 2001. The Kellerton
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: fire had been ruled accidental in 1998, reclassified as undetermined
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: and shelved. The Kellerton County Sheriff's Office reopened the file.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: At the time this record was compiled, charges in the
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: Kellerton case were pending. Whether Al Brandt, who lost his
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: hearing in a fire that was called an accident for
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: more than two decades, will see a second conviction No
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: one can say yet. What the Kellerton match confirmed was this.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Delacro Street was not the first time. Lewis had done
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: this before. He had stood in a machine shop, in
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: the dark, touched a window latch, and walked away. He
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: had then, three years later, driven a truck with a
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: magnetic sign to a heating supply depot, loosed a coupling
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: on drum. Three, set a timer, and driven away again.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: He had then pulled on a clean pair of boots and...
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: and answered the call with his crew. The system that
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: failed Jerry Riley failed Albrendt first. With the truth finally revealed,
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: a small detail from the sentencing phase resonated deeply. There
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: is a detail from the sentencing phase that the Millhaven
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Courier Register printed without analysis because it did not need any.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: A reporter asked Connie Riley what she planned to do
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: with the steel thermos, the one Jerry had carried since
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: high school. the one she had kept on the kitchen
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: windowsill for almost 19 years, in the spot where the
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: morning light came through. She said she was not sure
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: what she would do with it now. She said she
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: thought she might just leave it where it was. That
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: answer is not a resolution. It is not relief. It
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: is the shape of what 20 years of unanswered loss
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: leaves behind in a person, a habit of keeping something present,
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: because the alternative is an emptiness that has no name yet.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: that has no name yet. The thermos was never moved,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: because moving it would have required her to decide what
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: came next, and for almost 19 years, nothing came next.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: There was only the fire marshal's ruling and a condolence
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: letter from the same department that had sent Bruce Lewis
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: to the scene. Jerry Riley was 24 years old. He
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: had stayed late to finish a task he had been
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: putting off for two weeks. He had timed his walk
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: to the minute. He was saving for a certification he
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: never got to take. He did not know that a
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: man with a magnetic sign on his truck had already
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: been in the storage room that afternoon. The boot that
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: stood on the sidewalk across the street was was the
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: only thing Lewis left behind. He placed it there himself. Neatly, automatically.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: The way a person who has been careful his whole
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: life sets things down without thinking. He drove away. Sleet fell.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: The boot did not move. It waited almost 19 years
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: for a laboratory to catch up to it. It was enough.
• 20:33
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