She had expected him to make the officers take orders. She had expected a threat she could record, evidence that he used his position to intimidate a private citizen. He gave her neither.

“Sergeant,” Elijah said to Hayes, “this concerns my personal property. Document what you’ve been told. Contact an outside agency to handle any disputed ownership question. I won’t direct the investigation.”

Chen opened his notebook. Vivien began speaking again, but now her sentences stumbled over one another.

“I had a report. The system showed something. I was trying to protect the neighborhood.”

“Then let’s verify the report,” Hayes said.

Behind him, the recovery truck disappeared.

Elijah knew, with growing certainty, that the truck had not come to protect anybody.

CHAPTER 8: A NAME THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST

The officers separated the parties and requested documents.

Elijah brought the will, his father’s registration, photographs from the restoration, and a letter from the probate attorney explaining the delayed transfer. He laid them on the workbench instead of trying to press them into Rivera’s hand.

“I’d rather the independent investigator review these,” he said.

Hayes agreed. “That’s the best way to avoid questions later.”

Vivien waved a printed screenshot. It showed a vehicle-identification number matching the Mustang and the words DISPUTED OWNERSHIP.

“There,” she said. “What more do you need?”

Chen leaned closer without touching the page. “Where did you get this?”

“A publicly available database.”

“Which database?”

She hesitated. “A vehicle service.”

“You told dispatch you had confirmed the car was stolen,” Chen said. “This says ownership is disputed. Those are different things.”

Vivien looked at Hayes as if expecting him to reprimand the younger officer.

Hayes instead asked Chen to write down her exact words.

At 8:20, Detective Naomi Price from the State Bureau of Investigation arrived. She had a careful manner and a habit of letting people finish speaking even when they were making themselves look worse. Elijah had crossed paths with her at conferences but had never worked under her authority.

She shook his hand once. “You’re involved as a private citizen today, Chief.”

“Understood.”

“And you don’t get to decide whether the car goes anywhere.”

“Also understood.”

She smiled briefly. “That usually makes people less comfortable.”

Then she began checking the records.

Within an hour, the first true problem surfaced. There was an application for a replacement title bearing the Mustang’s VIN. It had been submitted ten days earlier by a business called Lakeview Collector Holdings, accompanied by an affidavit claiming the original owner had abandoned the vehicle in a storage facility.

Elijah read the date twice.

His father had died six months earlier. The car had spent the intervening months in Elijah’s own garage.

“Who signed the affidavit?” he asked.