The driver's door had closed at 9:14:12 that Saturday morning. There was no subsequent entry during her run, her return to the garage, or the minutes she had spent working beneath the hood. The next recorded opening was at 9:41:04, five minutes after the police cruiser entered the street. Monica checked the time against her own written notes and the metadata on Ralph's video before opening the side-camera file.
The image was low and wide, looking backward from the driver's-side mirror. At 9:41:04 the door swung into the frame, and Fowler's navy uniform filled the space beside it. His right hand moved toward his cargo pocket, the flap already open, and the hand emerged holding a dark object whose outline was briefly visible against his trousers. He bent into the car, concealing the object behind the door frame, and straightened fifteen seconds later holding the handgun aloft. Monica watched the clip seven times without changing her expression, then wrote the exact times on her legal pad.
The next clip showed the front edge of the hood and a portion of her own hands. At 9:36:50 Copeland entered the frame while the wrench rested flat beneath her right palm, its position unchanged as he moved closer. She watched her fingers remain still, remembering how carefully she had kept them visible while a pistol pointed at her back. Neither camera supplied every angle of the encounter, and she understood that an adversarial lawyer might argue about what lay outside the frame. The images nevertheless contradicted important parts of the report and preserved moments no officer had mentioned.
That evening a woman with short silver curls knocked at Monica's door carrying two paper cups of tea and a leather bag. She introduced herself as Harriet Okampo, a Denver defense lawyer who had practiced for nineteen years and whose family knew Thomas Underhill's wife. Harriet was in her late forties, plainly dressed, and possessed the habit of looking at a room's exits before sitting down. She took one look at the untouched tea already on Monica's table and said, "Good. You haven't been making the important decisions while trying to drink bad coffee. Show me what happened, beginning at nine-thirty."
Monica brought out her original notes, copies of the destruction certificates, the vehicle's door log, Ralph's video, and the saved clips from the sedan. Harriet watched each recording without interrupting, occasionally pausing to mark a timestamp on a yellow legal pad. When Fowler's hand emerged from his pocket, she paused the frame twice and studied the limitations of the view. When Copeland's report claimed Monica raised the wrench, Harriet compared the words with the front-camera clip and wrote down the precise interval that was visible. At last she leaned back and asked Monica whether she had made any copies of the original footage.