At 7:19, Hagen stepped away from Clayton and took out his phone. He turned his face toward unit seven, unaware the windshield camera was recording audio from the lot. "Tell Merl it's done," he said. "Yeah. On his own lot." Then he laughed and ended the call.
Clayton paused the file. The server fan hummed steadily beside them. From the service bay, the old refrigerator compressor came on, and the ordinary sound was startling because the room had gone so quiet. Sherman sat slowly on the stool beside the installation book.
"Merl," Clayton said. "Sutcliffe. They called him to tell him it was done."
"That doesn't prove every part of what we suspect," Sherman answered, "but it proves one thing they never wanted to admit. Somebody expected that arrest to happen."
Clayton opened the file details. The system had generated an integrity hash when the recording was archived, and the testing agreement required a complete data package for final acceptance. A copy of the camera archive would have to be delivered to the city whether the contract dispute continued or not.
"They took the cars," Clayton said. "But the cars were watching."
A voice spoke from the doorway. "Then somebody's going to come for that box, boss." Jaylen stood there with his jacket half zipped, looking as though he had walked over as soon as he saw the office light. He had not slept well since his arrest. When Clayton played the final few seconds again, the young man looked from the screen to the server with open alarm.
"They're going to erase it," Jaylen said. "Or they're going to take the whole thing and say it got lost."
Clayton looked toward the contract on the desk. He thought of the warning Ambrose had left there, the line about reading before signing. Then he turned to section 9.2, which specified delivery of complete, unaltered reliability-test data to the city's procurement office. The obligation was written into the same contract the city was using to suspend his payment.
"We don't hide it from the city," he said. "We deliver exactly what the city paid us to create. Then we get a receipt that tells the world where it went."
He turned to Sherman and Jaylen. "We copy everything. Not just the part that helps us. Every hour, every car, including the hours when nothing happened. We follow the contract so completely that nobody can say we changed the evidence to suit our story."
Sunday, October 4, was supposed to be a day Clayton spent at home with Hope. Instead he opened the shop's technical room at eight in the morning and placed two new encrypted storage drives beside the server. Erica brought breakfast and stayed long enough to check that he had slept. She understood why he was working, but she also reminded him that the police had already frightened their daughter once and that reckless secrecy would only make home feel less safe.
"Rosa knows what you're doing?" she asked.