The investigator showed up two days later, on a Wednesday morning, while I had a customer's sedan up on the lift for a brake job. I heard the door chime, and when I looked up, a man was standing in the doorway holding a leather badge case open at chest height. Plainclothes. Dark jacket, no tie, comfortable shoes.
"Investigator Aaron Bell," he said. "Cedar Ridge police. I need to talk to you about the Mercedes."
I wiped my hands on a rag and shook his. He had the kind of grip that doesn't try to prove anything.
"Come in," I said. "Coffee's fresh if you want it."
He took it black, and I poured him a mug from the pot on the bench. He stood there holding it, looking around the garage — lifts, tool chests, the framed registration on the wall — and then up to the shelf where the camera monitors were mounted.
"Those the cameras?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. Four of them. Two on the driveway, one on the street, one in the shop."
"How far back does the footage go?"
"Thirty days on the drive, then it overwrites."
He nodded, and I could see him doing the math. The tow had been two days ago. The first time Tyler parked across my garage had been twenty-one days ago. All of it was still there.
"I need copies of everything," he said. "All four cameras. The whole thirty days."
I stared at him. "All of it?"
"All of it."
I set him up at the bench with the monitor and showed him the playback, the timestamps, which camera was which. He watched a few minutes — me walking out in the morning, the Mercedes pulling in — and then he looked at me over the top of the monitor with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"Why did you keep so much?" he asked.
It was a fair question. Most people keep a doorbell clip when something happens. Most people don't have thirty days of four-camera coverage of their own driveway.
"Because he kept doing it," I said.
Bell was quiet for a second. Then he nodded, slow, like something had clicked into place.
"That's exactly why," he said.
He didn't explain what he meant, not then, and I didn't ask. I've learned that when a professional tells you something is exactly why, you let the sentence sit. But I understood well enough. A man who parks across your garage once is a jerk. A man who does it twenty-four times over nineteen days, on camera, laughing at the sign — that's a pattern. And patterns are what investigators build cases out of.
He asked me to copy the footage to a drive. Thirty days of four cameras is a lot of data, and my setup isn't new — the NVR chugged while Bell drank his coffee and asked me questions. When did it start? Did I ever confront Tyler directly? Did Meredith ever speak to me? Did I notice anything unusual about the car itself, beyond the parking?
I answered everything straight. I told him about the logbook, and his eyebrows went up, and he asked to see it. I pulled it off the shelf — nineteen days of entries, times and dates in my own hand — and he flipped through it slowly, page by page, and I watched his face change the way Officer Carter's had when she read the papers.
"Your father teach you this?" he asked, tapping the logbook.
"He taught me machines don't lie and people do," I said. "And never argue with memory. Write it down."
Bell smiled at that, the first real smile I'd seen from him. "Your father sounds like he'd have made a good cop."
The drive finished. Bell took it, sealed it in an evidence bag the same way Officer Carter had sealed the memory card, and tagged it. He gave me a receipt with a case number on it. I folded it into the logbook, because that's where things go that need to be found again.
At the door he stopped and looked back at the empty driveway, at the space where the Mercedes had been.
"You did good," he said. "Most people wouldn't have documented it. Most people would've just gotten mad."
"I got mad too," I said.
He nodded like he already knew that. "Mad's fine," he said. "Mad with records is better."
Then he walked out to his car, an unmarked sedan the color of dishwater, and drove away, and I went back to the brake job, and the garage fell back into its rhythm. But it felt different now. The documentation I'd kept to protect a driveway had become evidence in something I didn't understand yet, and Investigator Bell's last sentence followed me around the shop for the rest of the day: mad with records is better. My father would have liked that one.