She began visiting in person.
The first time, Victoria Hart arrived on a Tuesday morning in the salmon-pink pantsuit, sunglasses pushed up onto her platinum hair, and announced to Dana that the fuel-delivery truck idling at the pumps was a noise violation under the association's commercial standards.
Dana called Marcus from the back office. He came out, listened to the complaint in full, and then asked: "What specific law am I violating?"
She had no answer. The truck finished its delivery and left, and she followed it with her eyes as if it had personally offended her.
The second time, she came about the exterior lighting. The new LED fixtures, she said, were too bright for the residential streets across Dalton Avenue and created what she called "light trespass." Marcus walked her to the edge of the lot and pointed out that the fixtures were shielded, aimed downward, and measurably dimmer than the streetlights the county had installed the previous year. She left without answering, her heels loud on the new concrete.
The third time, it was the trash enclosure. The screening, she said, did not match the diagram. Marcus showed her the enclosure, which matched the diagram. She studied it for a long moment and changed the subject.
The fourth time, it was customers cutting through residential streets to reach the interstate — a route, Marcus noted, that had existed before the station reopened and would exist after, and that had nothing to do with him.
Each time, he listened politely. He offered her coffee, which she declined. Each time, he asked the same question: "What specific law am I violating?" She rarely had one.
Then Dana noticed the vans.
The first time, a white van with Pinnacle Neighborhood Services lettering on the side parked across the street from the station for most of a Tuesday afternoon. No one got out. No equipment was unloaded. Dana mentioned it to Marcus when he came in to review the week's receipts, and he made a note of it without comment.
The second time, the same van appeared on Thursday, this time in the rear lot, near the dumpster enclosure. A man in a Pinnacle polo walked the perimeter of the station with a clipboard, took photographs of the new pumps, and left without speaking to anyone.
The third time, a different Pinnacle vehicle — a pickup with a ladder rack — circled the block twice, slowly, the driver looking toward the station's roofline and the new camera mounts.
Marcus ran the company's name through his memory. Pinnacle Neighborhood Services handled the association's landscaping overflow and emergency maintenance. He had seen their invoices referenced in one of the notices' attachments — round numbers, emergency classifications, no bid documentation attached. The kind of paperwork that made his professional instincts itch.
He asked Dana to keep a log: date, time, vehicle description, what was observed. Nothing dramatic. Just a spiral notebook behind the counter, next to the lottery tickets, in Ruth's neat handwriting.
"What are we logging?" Dana asked.
"Patterns," he said. "Whether there's a legitimate work order for any of this. The station hasn't requested maintenance from Pinnacle or anyone else."
She made the first entry that afternoon. There was no legitimate work order. There never was.
Marcus did not mention the vans to Victoria Hart. He did not need to. He simply kept the notebook, kept the station's own security cameras recording on their regular schedule, and waited.
The vans kept coming, and the notebook kept filling.
The notebook grew. Dana's entries were precise: plate numbers when visible, times to the minute, descriptions of what the occupants did. On three occasions, the vans arrived within an hour of one of Victoria Hart's visits, though Dana could not say whether that meant anything.
Marcus began cross-referencing the van sightings with the station's own camera archive, a habit from twenty years of investigations. The footage confirmed Dana's notes and added one detail the notebook had missed: on two of the visits, the driver had held a phone to his ear while circling, as if narrating what he saw to someone on the other end.
He did not share this observation with anyone. He simply added it to his own private notes — separate from Dana's log, kept in his office — and continued with the renovation punch list as if nothing were unusual.
The station thrived. The vans watched. The two facts sat side by side in his mind, not yet connected, waiting for the case agents to catch up to what his instincts had already flagged.