"You need to call the police. " "And tell them what? " "Someone broke in and took some photographs of a car that may or may not be the subject of a corporate legal dispute I can't fully explain yet. " Cole heard his own voice come out harder than he intended. "The police report creates a paper trail that tells whoever did this exactly what we have and where we are in the investigation. " "Not reporting it creates a different problem. " "I know. " He sat down on the shop stool. "I know. " "I'm thinking. " "Cole. " Her voice shifted. Less operational, more direct. "Are you and Emma okay? " The question caught him slightly off guard.
Not the question itself, but the tone of it. The way it landed without any professional framing around it. Just the plain version of the concern. "We're fine. " he said. "They didn't come to the house. " "Yet. " He didn't respond to that because she was right and saying so wasn't going to help.
"File a report. " she said. "Generic break-in, undetermined items missing, no specific detail about what was taken. It establishes a record without exposing the investigation. And Cole, I want you to move Emma somewhere else for the next few weeks. Parents, a friend anywhere. " "Emma stays with me. " "That's" "She stays with me. " "I know where she is when she's with me.
I know she's safe. If I send her somewhere I can't see, I'll spend every hour worrying about whether she's okay, and I'll be useless. " He paused. "I'll be careful. But, she stays. " Victoria was silent for a moment. Cole half expected an argument.
She didn't give one. "Okay," she said. "Then we move faster. The Denver team, I'm moving the authentication appointment up. 2 weeks, not 3.
Can you have the documentation ready? " "I can have it ready in 10 days. " "10 days? " she confirmed. "And Cole, no more working with the door up. " "Already figured that out," he said. He hung up and sat in the locked workshop with the overhead lights humming and the desert outside getting its morning heat, and thought about a man named Douglas Farr and a London area code and a company called Meridian Asset Recovery, and how many layers of distance a person could put between themselves and a break-in before it wasn't their problem anymore. Not many was his assessment. Not many layers at all.
He filed the police report that afternoon, generic as Victoria suggested. The officer who took it was efficient and not particularly curious, which was fine. Cole gave him the basics and didn't elaborate. On the drive home, he stopped at Emma's school to pick her up rather than letting her walk, which he'd been doing since the calls started. Emma noticed the change in routine on day two, but hadn't commented on it until Wednesday, when she'd said simply, "I don't mind you picking me up, but you should know I'm not scared. " He'd said he knew, and that he picked her up because he liked the walk from the parking lot, and she'd given him the look that said she understood she wasn't being told the full truth and had decided, for now, to accept it.
He cooked dinner. He helped with the math homework, which was fractions in which Emma understood perfectly well but wanted to talk through out loud, which Cole had come to recognize as her way of processing things rather than actually needing help. He got her to bed. Then he sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and the encrypted drive and worked until 2:00 in the morning organizing the documentation into a sequence that would make sense to the authentication team in Denver. A technical narrative that moved from physical evidence to historical record to conclusion supported at each step by photographs and measurements and cross-references to Victoria's archival documents.