Chapter 109: Three Grounds
“Yes,” I said.
Kessler had already half turned toward her table.
“Yes what, Ms. Carter.”
“Yes, I told him. On the ninth of March 2026.”
“You told Mr. Blackwood, orally, in a conversation with no witnesses, thirteen months ago.”
“He wrote it down.”
There is a sound a courtroom makes when a lawyer must decide in under a second whether to ask the next question.
It is not silence. It is thirty people not moving.
Kessler asked it. She had to.
“Wrote what down.”
“There is a note clipped inside the front cover of the first log book, in his handwriting.”
“It says: Elias says keep a record at night, do whatever he asks. Then his initials, and 3/9/26.”
Salcedo said, “Where is that book, Ms. Carter?”
“In a box in the State’s Attorney’s office. It was inventoried in September.”
Kessler recovered fast and came the only way that was left.
“Who has had custody of that binder?”
“I did until the seventeenth of September. Then the police did.”
“So we are asked to accept a handwritten note, in your possession six months, produced on the morning of a suppression hearing.”
“You can ask him,” I said. “He’s sitting behind you.”
That was not composure.
That was me being tired enough to say a true thing without checking it first, and it happened to land.
Victor Blackwood was called at eleven twelve and was on the stand for ninety-one seconds.
He identified his own handwriting, his initials, and the date.
He said Dr. Moreno had telephoned him in Houston on the eighth of March 2026, and that he wrote the note the next morning on the corner of a delivery slip.
Kessler asked him one question on cross.
“Mr. Blackwood, did you intend that note to authorise the recording of your fiancée?”
“I intended it to authorise the recording of my son,” he said. “It never occurred to me that anybody else would be in that corridor at midnight.”
Salcedo ruled on the twenty-fourth of March. Six pages. I have it still.
She divided the device into three parts and she treated each of them differently, and that is why I say the recorder partly survived and partly did not.
One. The forty-six seconds from the foyer, on the fourteenth of September 2026.
Motion denied. Admitted.
On two independent grounds, either of which she said would have been sufficient.
That a statement made at raised volume in the entrance hall of a residence, in the presence of two members of staff, is not a private conversation within the meaning of the statute.
And that the defendant’s conduct brought Ms. Carter within the exception at section 14-3, she being the person against whom the offense was then committed, the statute containing no requirement that a device be started rather than already running.
Two. The one hundred and eighty-six night files from March to September 2026.
Admitted in part.
The recorded respiration of a sleeping child is not a conversation. It is a sound. The statute reaches conversations and electronic communications, and a child breathing in the dark is neither.
So the timestamps came in, and the breathing, and the durations, and Dr. Moreno could testify from them.
But every second of human speech on those one hundred and eighty-six files was excluded, and the State was ordered not to play them for any purpose beyond the respiratory record.
Three.
The 2025 files.
Four hours and eleven minutes across seventeen nights, between the fourth of August and the ninth of December 2025.
I was a night nurse then, and I used the recorder for my own shift notes, because you cannot write feeds in the dark without waking a baby.
The files with Ana Reyes-Blackwood’s voice on them.
Suppressed. All of them. Entirely.
Salcedo gave two reasons and each of them was correct.
The first was that those recordings captured private conversations at night between the decedent and other persons, in circumstances in which she plainly intended and was entitled to expect privacy.
She is dead and cannot consent, and no court may consent for her.
The second was one line, and it is the line that ends the whole question of Ana.
Those recordings have no relevance to the offense charged, which occurred on 14 September 2026 and concerns a different person.
I read those six pages standing in Adeyemi’s office with my coat still on.
The only recording in the world in which Ana Reyes-Blackwood says anything at all was now sealed in an envelope with a docket number written on the flap.
And the reason the law gave for sealing it was that she was entitled to her privacy.
I understand it. I understood it then. That is what makes it unbearable rather than outrageous.
Adeyemi made me sit down and said the thing lawyers say.
That suppression is not destruction. That the ruling bound one courtroom in one case. That if another proceeding ever arose, the question could be argued again.
“Will another proceeding arise?”
“No,” she said. “But that is a different sentence and I want you to hear both of them.”
Two days later Marina Kessler telephoned Teresa Vukovich and asked what her client would have to plead to in order to stay out of prison.