Officer Kevin Doyle rolled onto Maple Court as Joe was backing the flatbed into position. He parked in the space Joe had left him, got out with his notebook already open, and took Mike's report number, logbook, and timeline with the air of a man who had been read the whole saga by dispatch and intended to see the ending.
"Mr. Callahan, this is the best-documented illegal park I've seen in fifteen years," Doyle said. "Most people just call and yell."
"I did the yelling in September," Mike said. "This is October's method."
Joe, meanwhile, did the work. He tilted the bed down to its working angle, laid the winch cable out with the care of a man rigging a sail, and checked the Porsche's front wheels for the steering lock. The car sat low, and Joe worked the low-angle skates under the front tires gentle as a nurse sliding a board under a patient. Rosa, from her fence, narrated softly to no one: "He is very good. In sixty years nobody towed anything on this street. He is very good."
"All right," Joe said. "Coming up."
The winch took the strain. The cable sang its low metal note. The Porsche's nose rose by inches, the front of the car lifting as the bed's angle hauled it up and back — and that was when something hiding in the dark under the car gave way to gravity.
It came off the undercarriage at the driver's side, just behind the front wheel, with a clunk that was not a car sound at all. It hit the apron, bounced once off the concrete with a crack like a dropped toolbox, and burst open — because a fall of two feet onto concrete was more than its latch had ever been asked to survive.
It was a lockbox. Black steel, the size of a lunchbox, with two flat magnets the size of drink coasters stuck to its lid.
And out of it, onto the pale concrete of the apron, in front of nine neighbors and one police officer: license plates. Not one plate. Plates, plural, stacked and banded, Ohio and Indiana and one from Kentucky. And beside them, spilling out of a zippered pouch, car key fobs — six of them, seven — each with a little white tag tied to it with string, and handwriting on the tags.
Nobody on Maple Court said anything at all.
The winch kept humming for exactly two seconds before Joe's hand moved, without any hurry whatsoever, and stopped it. The Porsche hung there, nose up, halfway to the bed, like a horse that had been asked a question.
"Officer," Joe said, in a voice of enormous calm. "I'm going to leave her right there, if that's all right with you."
Officer Doyle had gone very quiet. Mike had never seen a man go quiet the way Doyle went quiet: it was the quiet of a man watching a parking complaint put on a suit and become something else entirely. Doyle held up one hand — not to Joe, not to Mike, just to the morning in general, a request for the world to hold still — and stepped closer without touching anything. He crouched the way Joe had crouched, and he looked at the plates, and at the fobs, and at the little handwritten tags, and Mike watched him read one tag from where it lay and saw the exact moment the officer's face changed.
Doyle stood up. He unclipped his radio.
"Dispatch, this is Doyle, Maple Court. I need you to roll Detective Stein to my location, and a second unit for scene control. And dispatch — tell Stein it's the red Porsche from the Callahan log. Tell her she's going to want gloves, bags, and the good camera." He listened. "No. Nobody's touched anything. The tow operator stopped the winch on his own. We are all just standing here looking at the driveway."
He clipped the radio back and turned a full slow circle, taking in the coffee cups, the folding chair, Rosa at the fence, Emma on the porch with her backpack forgotten at her feet.
"Folks," Officer Doyle said, pleasantly, "the car is not being towed anymore. The car is evidence. Nobody touch the box, nobody touch the car, and if anybody has been taking video — and I can see three of you — please don't delete a single second of it. Mr. Callahan." He turned to Mike, and there was something in his face that Mike would remember for years: gratitude, of all things. "Your logbook just became the most important document on this street. When the detective asks how long this car's been parking here —"
"Six weeks," Mike said. "Give or take."
"Six weeks," Doyle repeated, shaking his head slowly. "Six weeks of somebody parking his whole operation in your driveway, because it was the one place in Columbus nobody would ever think to look."
Chapter 13: The Detective