Clayton stood beside him. "You're going to help me put it back up." Sherman did not answer immediately. Then he nodded and said the bolts were still good, the frame still sound, and there was no reason a man could not restore a thing that had been removed for the wrong reasons.
Before Duke left, Clayton asked who had made the complaint. Duke said it had been submitted anonymously. Clayton asked him to record that the owner had requested the source and the applicable code section. Duke hesitated, then wrote the request by hand at the bottom of the inspection sheet.
"In thirty years, most people just get angry at me," Duke said. "They don't ask me to put a question in the file."
"I've been angry all week," Clayton replied. "It hasn't told me anything useful."
That evening, Jaylen remained at the shop later than his shift required. He stood in the office doorway holding his phone, looking embarrassed. "Boss, I may have something from Saturday," he said. "I took a video for the sale, just before seven. I forgot about it because of everything that happened."
Clayton motioned him inside. They watched forty seconds of sunrise over the lot. At first it was exactly what Jaylen described: silver hoods, mist, and orange light catching the windows. There were no officers, no arguments, and no indication anyone on the property knew what was about to happen.
"It's pretty," Clayton said after the first viewing. "Nothing wrong with it. But run it again, slowly." He had learned from Sherman that the second look often mattered more than the first, especially when a mechanic had already decided what the problem was.
At twenty-eight seconds, the frame widened toward Route 9. A charcoal-gray sedan sat on the far shoulder near the closed bakery, white exhaust visible behind it. Jaylen had never noticed the car while filming. Clayton paused the image and enlarged it enough to see the plate, then wrote down the characters he could read without trying to invent the blurred ones.
"That's a dealer plate," he said. "Indiana uses them on qualifying dealership vehicles. See the D? We can identify the category, but we can't identify the driver from that alone."
Sherman joined them and remembered seeing the sedan before seven. It had been parked on the shoulder with its engine running while the bakery was still closed. Later, he recalled, it had driven away while Clayton was being cuffed. He had assumed someone was watching the commotion, just as several other drivers had slowed on the highway.
Clayton wrote a timeline on the back of a repair slip. Video at 6:58. Police arrival at 7:10. An unidentified vehicle waiting before the alleged theft report. Its departure after the detention. None of those facts proved who made the call, but together they gave him his first reason to think someone had planned to watch the incident unfold.