He rolled the factory scan tool over to the Bentley, which was still in the delivery bay waiting for Mrs. Sato-Bell's driver, and he did what he hadn't had time to do on Thursday. He didn't just read the codes. He went into the engine controller's fault memory history, the deep layer, where a car keeps its own diary: every time a fault happened, with the date, the odometer, the voltage, the number of times it had recurred.
The communication fault with the engine controller had first logged on September 30th. Nine days before Thursday. Odometer: 0.8 miles. That was the morning they'd driven it off the transport truck and into the showroom, two-tenths of a mile before it parked on the white tile and sat. Occurrence count: fourteen. Fourteen times that relay had dropped out, over nine days, every time somebody opened the door and the car woke up to show a customer the screen. Nobody had noticed because nobody had tried to start it. It had been a very beautiful piece of furniture.
He printed it. He took a photo of the screen with his phone, with the VIN visible. Then he went to the shop's security monitor, the one Kessler didn't know the techs could see because the IT contractor had set it up in a hurry, and he pulled up the showroom camera for September 30th and watched a porter drive the silver car in, and watched it sit. He scrolled to Thursday. He watched Ezra Toussaint walk in at 7:40 holding his mother's hand. Watched him sit in the caramel chair. Watched him read for three hours, getting up once for the bathroom, which was on the opposite side of the building. Watched him stand. Watched him walk to the bumper at 9:52 with his hands in his hoodie pocket, and keep them there, the whole time, until he walked back.
Julian sat back in the rolling chair and let out a breath that he felt all the way down in his ribs.
He asked Osvaldo for the address. Osvaldo looked at him a long second before he wrote it down.
The house was off Route 9, past the feed store, a white frame house with a ramp built onto the front porch out of pressure-treated lumber that had gone silver. Behind it, a cinderblock building painted green, with fading white letters. Julian parked his daughter's Corolla on the gravel — Hazel's car, which he had this week because her mother was out of town and because it kept dying and Hazel was seventeen and had cried about it in a parking lot — and sat for a moment reading the sign. GAINES AUTO ELECTRIC. Starters. Alternators. Wiring.
Oh, he thought. Oh. Of course.
Yolanda opened the door before he knocked. She had a dish towel over her shoulder and did not invite him in.
"Mr. Marek."
"Julian. I'm — I'm sorry to come to your house. I heard what happened. I wanted to tell you before tomorrow." He held up the folder. "The car logged that fault nine days before your son ever walked in. Fourteen times. I've got the printout. I've got the camera. He never touched it. His hands were in his pocket the entire time."
Yolanda looked at the folder and didn't take it.
"You were standing right there on Thursday," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."