If you think about it, service of process is both mundane and weighty with meaning. On the one hand you have the server (In Idaho: an adult, over 18, not a party to the case) who may have done this a hundred times before; on the other, someone whose life is about to dramatically change.
My first personal acquaintance with the concept of process service came on a summer afternoon some years ago during what I now think of as my “advocacy phase,” when my husband Peter got served a subpoena by a police officer whose name I don’t remember. Peter was to appear in court to testify against his former best friend in a domestic battery case. That court case formally ended a friendship. It also swept us up in something bigger than ourselves, that kept us absorbed for the next several years. It was years ago, now, but I vividly remember the day the papers got served – the heat; the raspberries I had been picking in the backyard, the tall officer on our front steps surrounded by toys and curious neighbor kids; a dragonfly that buzzed by.
On this current case, it is to my undying shame I confess that, even though I had uncovered the exact item of information that would lead directly to finding our guy, it was Chris that still had to put two and two together. My novice brain was high on the fact that I could literally pick up the phone and call a JAIL and get any kind of an answer – and without even pretexting! To my mind, this was a brilliant and unforeseen discovery. Who knew government institutions would be so forthcoming? What to do with my discovery, I did not yet have a concept for. Like a kitten with its first mouse, I was just happy to have caught something.
Thankfully, Chris knew what to do. With admirable simplicity, he called out a fact I had missed – that the town Uncle Target got released to just two months prior showed up quite clearly in our initial search as the town where one of his female associates also lived – a girlfriend probably. Like many places in North Idaho, this town was small enough Chris could simply drive by the address on his way to the store later. And, as luck would have it, Uncle Target’s truck was sitting right there in the driveway.
Boom. He got served.
And I was hooked. Fledgling though it may have been, the process I had just seen completed was the marriage of thorough, detailed analysis with creative, lateral thinking effort – that is to say, it was most of the investigative cycle. Discovery, distillation, analysis, a flash of insight, and blammo, the solution was right in front of us. I fell in love immediately.
Investigative work continues to be just like this. It is mostly made up of long periods of exhaustive digging, misdirection, frustrating and laborious analysis, and sometimes, an actual series of dead ends.
But it is also sprinkled with what I can only think of as flashes and sparkles of discovery. These are the finds that keep the serious ones of us going: the unforeseen glimmers of inspiration, the streak of memory in the wee hours of the morning – like the sparkles of mica, or gold, in the waters of an Idaho creek below an abandoned mine, like the raspberries and dragonflies of summer.