She opened a blank document and typed Curtis A. Lyle — Jazzmaster — Thames St. — 2024.
Then she sat back and thought about how she would do it, if she were the kind of person who did it.
You'd go into a shop. A small one. Old guy, old woman, nobody under sixty behind the counter, no lawyer on retainer, no security camera worth the name. You'd sell them something. Or you wouldn't even sell them anything, you'd just look in the window, find something they owned that was worth real money and had no paperwork, because who had paperwork for a forty-year-old anything? You'd take a picture. You'd write up a police report: burglary, my father's, sentimental value. You'd have an appraisal made, by a friend or by a printer. You'd call the police every day until they went and got it. Then you'd walk into the station with your papers and walk out with your property.
And then you'd sell it. And then you'd do it again.
And the shop would get charged with receiving. And the shop, terrified, out of money, would take whatever deal got offered. And you'd never be in the courtroom at all, because complainants didn't have to be in the courtroom when there was no trial.
It would work best against a certain kind of person. A person who'd rather lose a guitar than spend a year fighting the State of Maryland.
Nadia set the search to Baltimore City and Baltimore County and went through every theft-receiving charge of the past four years by hand, opening every case where the defendant's address looked like a business, reading every docket entry.
It took six hours. Her tea went cold three times.
By eleven she had a list.
State v. Rosario Ocampo — Highlandtown, Eastern Avenue. Ocampo Pawn & Loan. Receiving, a gold Rolex Datejust. Charged March 2025. Pleaded to a misdemeanor, probation before judgment, seven months later.
State v. Harold Feingold — Baltimore County, Towson, York Road. Feingold Antiques. Receiving, a Tiffany-style lamp. Charged November 2023. Stet docket.
State v. Kwame Asante — Mount Vernon, Charles Street. Asante Frame & Art. Receiving, an oil painting. Charged June 2025. Nolle prosequi.
And her father, July 2024, in the middle.
Four shops in a little under three years. All old. All small. All charged with receiving a single high-value item. None of them convicted of anything that stuck. None of the items, as far as she could tell from the dockets, ever returned to the shop.
At a quarter to eleven she wrote down the phone number for Ocampo Pawn & Loan, which was still in business and closed until Monday, and she wrote down the number for Asante Frame & Art, which wasn't, and then she sat looking at the list on her screen and felt something she hadn't felt in two years. Not hope. Something harder and more useful than hope.