“Good,” I said. “I’ll need yesterday’s footage.”
He nodded. “Not a problem, Officer.”
While he went to retrieve the footage, I walked back toward the fenced holding area where my cars sat waiting. Seeing them there stirred a strange mix of relief and anger. Relief because they were still intact. Anger because they had almost been destroyed because of one person’s petty obsession.
Karen had complained about my cars for months, but I never imagined she would go this far just to get rid of them.
But now she had made a mistake.
A big one.
Because everything she had done left a paper trail—tow records, scrapyard paperwork, security footage—and if she had lied to get those cars removed, every one of those records would become evidence.
The yard manager returned a few minutes later holding a flash drive.
“Got the camera footage from yesterday afternoon,” he said, handing it to me.
“Thanks.”
He hesitated before speaking again.
“Officer, those cars look like they’re worth a lot.”
“They are,” I said quietly.
“Well, whoever authorized this was pretty eager. The tow driver said the woman who filed the complaint called him three times asking if the cars had been crushed yet.”
I stopped walking.
“She called the tow company?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Driver mentioned it while unloading them. Said the lady sounded excited… excited about destroying someone else’s property.”
That told me something important.
Karen didn’t just want the cars gone.
She wanted them destroyed.
Which meant when she learned they were still sitting here untouched, she was going to panic.
And right now she had no idea the person investigating the entire situation was the same neighbor she had been trying to bully for the past year.
I slipped the flash drive into my pocket and looked back at the three cars behind the fence.
They weren’t scrap.
They were evidence.
And the moment I returned to the station and opened that footage, I had a feeling Karen’s entire plan was about to start unraveling.
Because people who lie on official documents rarely stop at just one lie.
And if Karen had cut corners to make this happen, the video cameras were about to prove it.
Back at the station, I headed straight for the evidence review room. The small office smelled faintly of coffee and printer ink, and the only light came from the glow of the monitor on the desk. I plugged the flash drive from the scrapyard into the computer and pulled up the security footage from the previous afternoon.
A grid of camera angles appeared on the screen. One showed the yard entrance. Another showed the unloading area where new vehicles were brought in. I clicked on the timestamp listed on the paperwork.
The video began playing.
At first the yard looked normal. Workers moved around stacks of metal while forklifts carried piles of crushed cars to different sections of the lot.
Then a tow truck pulled through the gate.