Phase three was the most damning part of the entire folder, outlining how Wade's crippled business would eventually force him into selling the strip of land at a steep discount.
Buried further inside was a draft purchase agreement, complete with a proposed signing date set exactly three days after the night his vehicles disappeared. The buyer listed on that agreement wasn't the Blackridge Estates Homeowners Association at all, but a newly formed limited liability company nobody in the community had ever heard of before. Rebecca ran a record search on the LLC and found a name connected to it that immediately caught her attention: one of the individuals listed as a partner in that company had an existing business relationship with Troy Kessler, the same man who ran Redline Recovery.
Piece by piece, the picture Marissa had spent months trying to hide was assembling itself in front of everyone. It became clear that Marissa hadn't simply been protecting the interests of her community as she'd always claimed publicly. She appeared to be engineering a deal in which the land would be acquired cheaply through pressure and deception, then resold later at a significant profit either back to the association or to an outside developer.
With this new information in hand, Wade, Rebecca, and Mason worked together to trace the exact route the towing footage and traffic cameras suggested Redline had taken hours earlier. That trail led them directly to the industrial warehouse where the shell company had been storing Wade's 22 vehicles since before dawn.
When they arrived, Troy tried to insist he had simply been following lawful orders given to him by Marissa, nothing more. Wade asked him a single direct question: "Show me the lawful order you were following."