He turned the phone over, thumbed it open, and pressed play.
There it was. Shaky, angled slightly wrong, but unmistakable.
Grant's boot against the cane. The laugh. Norah stepping in. The grab. The stumble.
Every second of it, time-stamped, undeniable. Sitting on an old man's phone because some quiet habit had told him, without asking why, that this was a morning worth keeping.
Ren looked up at him, something thick in her throat. "Frank..."
"Don't thank me yet," he said, pocketing the phone again like it was something fragile. "Thank me Thursday night, after we've used it for something."
Chief Doyle confirmed it himself an hour later, standing in the doorway of the bakery in his uniform, looking more tired than Ren had ever seen him.
"The transit camera data is gone," he said. "I pulled the maintenance logs myself this morning. Whoever wiped it did a clean job. Professional, even. Not the kind of mistake a bored technician makes on a slow Tuesday."
He glanced at Frank. "I hear you've got something that might make up the difference."
"I do," Frank said. And there was something almost fierce in the old man's voice. A fire Ren hadn't heard from him before. "And I intend to bring it to that hearing Thursday night, whether Walter Colton likes it or not."
Doyle nodded slowly. "I can't officially endorse citizens showing up to a council hearing with recorded evidence like it's a courtroom. But unofficially, Mr. Delaney, I'd say bring every second of that footage you've got."
He turned to Ren before he left. "You given any more thought to what I said about telling your story?"
Ren looked down at the folded pages still sitting in her jacket pocket. The ones with a Colton Properties letterhead on them, and a name she hadn't stopped thinking about since Tuesday night.
"I've been thinking about it," she said. "I think there might be more to tell than either of us realized."
Doyle studied her a moment, then reached into his own jacket and pulled out a business card, worn soft at the corners.
"This is a number for a colleague of mine over in County Records. Retired detective. Does some part-time work verifying old documents when things get contested. If that eviction filing turns into something more than a hunch, and you want it confirmed properly before you say a word about it in public, give her a call. Better to walk into that hearing with something solid than something you're still guessing at."
Ren took the card. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Doyle said, the smallest flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "I'm just doing my job. Same as you did on that sidewalk, whether this town understood it yet or not."
She called the number that afternoon from the back room of the bakery, and by evening had a short, careful confirmation from a woman named Carol Whitfield, who had spent 30 years cross-referencing exactly this kind of paperwork and knew precisely how to separate a real thread from a false one.