Daniel closed the folder. "Then our next job is finding out who signed it, what they claimed to represent, and whether they had any authority at all."
The following morning he was back at my kitchen table before sunrise, this time with a thicker file. He looked tired enough that I suspected he had spent most of the night reading records that had never been properly indexed. I poured him coffee and sat down before he finished taking off his coat. When Daniel started a conversation by saying there was a problem, it usually meant the problem had acquired a second and uglier layer.
"The company named on that transfer approval dissolved twenty-four years ago," he said. "The old manager whose signature appears on Karen's supporting paperwork died twelve years ago."
I stared at him. "Could the document simply be an older authorization somebody copied into the file?"
"Possibly. The signature may be reproduced from a historic document rather than forged yesterday. That's why we need the original, the chain of custody, and the actual transfer dates. But the paperwork Karen relied on cannot by itself establish present authority to relocate fish onto your property."
I thought about Karen standing at the pond, smiling as she called the whole thing an emergency. "She acted as though there was nothing left to discuss."
"That's often what people do when they don't want the documents discussed," Daniel said. "I can't prove her intent yet. But there are too many irregularities for us to accept her version without examining it."
We spread the maps across the table once more. Daniel placed the 1978 agricultural survey beside a modern storm-water plan, then laid a photograph of the fish-transfer invoice above them. The old Riverstone facility lay along the drainage corridor, the newer Silver Ridge retention basins had been built upstream, and my pond sat beyond the old inspection channel. In that arrangement, my water was the nearest large private receiving basin connected to the historic aquatic system.
"That location isn't accidental," I said.
"It's geographically convenient, certainly. Whether somebody chose it for that reason or for another purpose is what the records should tell us."
He showed me an engineering note from several years earlier documenting fish appearing in Silver Ridge's drainage ponds during periods of high water. The original breeding site had been partly abandoned when adjacent property changed hands, and its barriers had deteriorated over time. Some stock could have moved with overflow, while other animals might have been relocated by people who wanted them out of the way. The record did not conclusively separate those groups, but it established that the association had known about the population long before Karen presented it as a sudden emergency.
"They've had years to think about these fish," I said.
"At least several years of notice that the problem existed. The immediate transfer may have been recent, but the underlying issue wasn't discovered last week."