"Most people," she told Julian, "don't realize their car is a witness. It's sitting there listening to everything, all the time. It knows when you unlock it, which key you unlock it with, which door you open and when. A car like yours, with the guard package, has sensors that can feel a shopping cart bump the fender in a parking lot. It's not like a camera. It doesn't care what anybody looks like. It just counts."
"Then let's let it count," Julian said.
The data came back from Mercedes on October fourteenth as a forty-page PDF of time-stamped event codes, accompanied by a sworn affidavit from a records custodian in Atlanta. Julian sat at his drafting table in the Monument Avenue house with the pages spread out in front of him and a yellow highlighter in his right hand and read them the way he had read thousands of pages of load tables in forty years of practice: slowly, line by line, looking for the place where the numbers stopped agreeing with each other.
They did not stop agreeing. That was the point.
22:40:29 — Keyless Go: Authorized key detected. Key ID 2 of 2. Registered user: ASHBY, JULIAN R.
22:40:29 — Driver door handle: extended (approach).
22:40:30 — Vehicle unlocked: Keyless Go, driver door.
22:40:31 — Driver door: open.
22:40:38 — Parking damage detection: impact event, front zone, hood. Severity: 3 of 3.
22:40:39 — Notification sent: primary user device; secondary user device.
22:40:41 — Parking damage detection: secondary event, front zone, hood. Severity: 2 of 3.