"I'm on leave," Yolanda said.
"So come as a customer," Julian said. "They let customers in the front."
VII.
The conference room at Larkspur had a long walnut table and a window onto the service drive, where porters in black polos moved cars in and out under the canopy like a slow, careful dance. Ezra sat at the far end in his school clothes, a collared shirt his mother had ironed at six that morning, with a late-arrival slip for school folded in his pocket. Yolanda sat beside him in her church blazer. Neither of them touched the bottled water.
Dana Whitfield came in with a laptop and a man from Northgate's human resources office who said his name and then said nothing else for forty minutes. She was younger than Ezra expected, and she shook his hand first, before his mother's, and looked at him while she did it.
Mr. Kessler sat at her right. His suit was gray today. The pocket square was white.
Julian came in last, still in his work shirt, carrying a manila folder and a small plastic bag. He set the bag in the middle of the walnut table. Inside it lay a gray relay, its cover pried off.
"Tell me what I'm looking at," Dana said.
Julian told her. He told it the way Pop would have wanted, Ezra thought: what it did, what they thought, what they checked, what they found. He slid the fault-history printout across the table and put his finger on the date, September 30th, and the odometer, 0.8 miles, and the count, fourteen. He handed her the loupe and let her look at the contacts. He opened his laptop and showed her the camera footage, sped up, three hours of a boy in a caramel chair turning pages, and then the walk to the bumper with his hands in his pocket, and then the hands staying there.
"He didn't touch it," Julian said. "He listened to it. I've been doing this twenty-two years and I was listening to my meter instead of the car. That's on me. I wrote it on the RO because it's the truth."
Dana watched the footage to the end. Then she turned, not to Julian, but to the man at her right.
"Warren. The still image you sent me last night was from 9:52."
"Yes."