"Your client gave permission for this information to be referred?" he asked. Wynn confirmed the scope of the consent and showed him the related documentation. She explained which materials were public, which could be described in a sworn declaration, and which would require independent production under lawful process. Marcus agreed not to use sensitive divorce records as a shortcut to publicity. He would provide that information to appropriate investigators and seek subpoenas or other authorized discovery for evidence relevant to his civil case. If there was a financial scheme, the documents needed to stand in court without dragging Diane through unnecessary exposure.
After Wynn left, Marcus called Roy Briggs and asked him to map the three companies, review property transfers, and identify every documented encounter involving Finch near Strand's development sites. Roy listened without interruption. Then he said, "If there's a pattern, it'll be in the dates. The money, the complaint calls, the code citations, and the offers. They won't all match perfectly, but we can find out whether they move together."
Marcus told him to examine the possibility of innocent explanations as seriously as the suspicious ones. Roy said he would. He had learned long ago that a theory could become its own kind of blindness if an investigator fell in love with it too early.
Roy's work led him back to Caldwell Road. Several families had lived there for decades, some in homes inherited from parents or grandparents. They had watched shops close, rents rise, and development proposals arrive wrapped in promises of improvement. A retired nurse named Lillian Carter showed Roy letters offering to buy her home and photographs of unfamiliar vehicles parked outside for long periods after she refused. A mechanic named Samuel Brooks described repeated complaints about cars on his property, including vehicles that were legally registered and parked behind his workshop. In each case, Roy asked for records rather than relying on the residents' understandable suspicions.
Some details matched routine municipal activity; others did not. Calls that supposedly arose from independent neighborhood concerns appeared in clusters shortly after purchase offers were rejected. Several police incident reports identified Finch as the responding officer. Others involved officers who had no known connection to Strand. Roy distinguished those cases carefully, setting aside anything that could not be connected by evidence. The remaining timeline showed a pattern strong enough to justify asking more questions, not yet strong enough to convict anyone of a conspiracy.
The residents' emotional accounts were harder to fit into a chart. Lillian told Roy that she had stopped sitting on her front porch because unfamiliar men sometimes photographed the house from the street. Samuel said that he began checking the windows before his daughter came home from school. They had no wish to make their neighborhood a symbol in a national controversy. They wanted to live in the houses they had paid for without being treated as obstacles to someone else's business plan. Roy reported those details to Marcus alongside the property records because legal consequences, he knew, were rarely limited to the documents that proved them.