Leah printed the list and spread it across her desk. The same towing company appeared again and again: Westline Recovery, a small operator with a storage lot on the industrial side of town. The invoices varied, but most included a release fee, a daily storage charge, and a vaguely described administrative cost. Some drivers had paid more than a thousand dollars to recover vehicles that had never been reported stolen and were parked in spaces they were authorized to use. Others had abandoned their cars because the charges exceeded their value.
The oldest file that drew Leah's attention belonged to a home health aide named Naomi Bell. Naomi was thirty-nine, raising two children and working split shifts to support her mother after a stroke. Six months earlier she had parked her eight-year-old sedan in Harbor Point while visiting a patient who lived above the retail concourse. She had a valid visitor pass on her dashboard, but a building tenant complained that her vehicle looked abandoned. Sergeant Rusk arrived, declared the situation a security risk, and arranged for Westline to remove it before Naomi returned from the appointment.
Naomi had spent the next three days trying to find her car. She missed two shifts, paid hundreds of dollars in fees, and was told by the towing company that the police had authorized the removal. When she went to the station to complain, an officer suggested she should have chosen a more appropriate place to park. She kept every receipt because she was the kind of person who balanced her household budget to the dollar. She also kept the original visitor pass in a folder marked CAR, written in thick blue marker for the day she might need it.
Leah called Naomi, who answered from a hospital parking lot during a ten-minute break. At first she thought the inspector was another collection agent or someone asking why she had not paid an additional charge. When Leah explained the garage investigation, Naomi was silent for several seconds. "I wrote to the department twice," she said. "Nobody answered. I thought that meant I was the only one they did it to."
The next file concerned a man named Luis Ortega, who operated a small appliance delivery service with his brother. Luis had parked his truck in a commercial loading area designated for deliveries while carrying a refrigerator to an office suite. A security camera showed a Westline driver hooking the truck while Luis was still inside the building, and Rusk's incident report described him as an unauthorized vendor. Luis had presented delivery paperwork when he arrived, but nobody had included it in the police file. He recovered the truck after borrowing money from a friend, then lost a customer because he missed the following day's appointments.