22:44:12 — Vehicle locked: remote key, all doors.
22:44:15 — Vehicle unlocked: remote key, all doors.
And then, scrolling down, for the rest of the night, through the wrecker that eventually towed it to the department's impound lot and back to the Ashby garage the next afternoon: nothing. No alarm. No forced-entry event. No other key. No attempted entry of any kind.
He laid the page beside Russell Dacey's incident report, which the department had released to Delphine under Virginia's criminal records law on the twelfth, heavily redacted but legible where it counted.
Officer observed the subject, a Black male approx. 60 yrs, attempting the door handles of multiple vehicles in the hotel's secured lot over a period of approximately two minutes. The vehicle alarm of a dark-colored Mercedes activated. Officer approached and identified himself and issued multiple verbal commands to step away from the vehicle, which the subject ignored. Subject reached toward his waistband. In fear for his safety, officer guided the subject onto the hood of the vehicle and secured him. Subject continued to actively resist by refusing to present his left arm for handcuffing.
Julian read it twice. Then he picked up a red pen, which he had not used for anything but marking up a junior architect's drawings in twenty years, and began writing in the margin.
Two minutes. The car said he had touched exactly one handle, his own, eight seconds after he came through the gate. The Snitch, the key cabinet at the valet stand, said the same: the hotel's general manager, a brisk Hungarian woman named Celeste Varga who had once spent forty minutes with Julian arguing about the correct color of the porte-cochère's glass, had demanded the cabinet's log from Capitol Premier the morning after the incident, on the grounds that it was installed on her wall and recorded activity on her property. The log showed one fob removed from hook fourteen at 22:39:51 by employee code 0417, BARRIENTOS T., and a still image from the cabinet's lens at the same instant: Teo in his red vest, Julian in his tuxedo, the fob passing between their hands, both of them looking down at it. No other fob was removed between 22:30 and 22:55.
Alarm activated. The car said no alarm had activated at any time that night.
Multiple verbal commands, ignored. The car said the driver's door had opened at 22:40:31, and the hood had taken the first impact at 22:40:38. Seven seconds. Julian said it aloud in his empty study, counting on his fingers. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. In seven seconds Russell Dacey had walked from the gate to the car, identified himself, issued multiple commands, watched them be ignored, perceived a reach for the waistband, and, in fear for his safety, guided.
He circled that word in red. Then he called a woman he had known since graduate school.
Dr. Anjali Rao was a professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who did forensic work on the side, mostly for insurance companies, mostly on bridges and crane collapses and once, memorably, on a roller coaster. She drove up from Blacksburg on the sixteenth with a graduate student and a van full of equipment, and they spent six hours in Julian's garage with the cover off the car.