Nobody in the room had asked what doesn't belong looked like. Kyle had not asked either. It had seemed obvious at the time.
He had been parked dark at the end of the row in Lot E for forty minutes on the night of the twelfth, lights off, engine off, watching the fence line, when he saw a figure in a long black coat come down the row and stop at a classic car and, a couple of minutes later, get out again and open the hood. He saw a hammer in the figure's hand. He saw the beam of a flashlight go down into the engine compartment. He did not see a uniform. He did not see a lanyard. He saw a long black coat, and a dark face, and a hammer, and a car worth more than his own truck, and he thought: there it is.
He would watch the footage of what happened next more than a hundred times over the following four months, and every single time, the part that made him put his hand over his eyes was not the grab. It was what he had felt in his chest at the moment he got out of the cruiser. It had not been fear. It had been something closer to excitement. He had been certain.
* * *
His sergeant, Lucia Amaro, called him into her office at the end of the next shift and closed the door.
"Sit," she said.
He sat.
"Your camera," she said. "You activated it at zero-zero-zero-nine and seventeen seconds. By your own report, you made contact at approximately zero-zero-zero-eight. That's more than a minute. Explain that to me."
"I forgot," he said. "I got out of the car and I was focused on the subject and I forgot. I hit it as soon as I remembered."
"You forgot." Amaro took off her reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Kyle, you know the camera's got a buffer, right? Sixty seconds of video before you hit the button. No audio, just video. It's all there. Not your words, but your hands."
He had known that, in the way that he knew the camera had a battery and a serial number. He had not thought about it.
"There's a records request in already," Amaro said. "Filed at six in the morning. From the complainant herself, not a lawyer. Very specific. She asked for the buffer by name. She asked for CAD and dispatch and the full history on the VIN record. Somebody in Records called me about it because nobody's ever asked for the history on a legacy record before and they didn't know how to pull it." She put her glasses back on and looked at him over them. "She's a captain at Meridian. She's a lieutenant colonel in the Guard. She teaches accident investigation. Did you know that?"