I reached for my phone and dialed the direct line for Pete Holbrook. Pete owned the diesel repair yard directly adjacent to my father’s machine shop on French Road. For thirty years, Pete and my dad had shared a common chain-link fence, a snowplow contract, and an unwritten rule about keeping an eye on each other’s bay doors after dark.
The call connected on the fourth ring over the shrieking rattle of an impact wrench.
"Holbrook," Pete barked.
"Pete, it's David. I'm in Chicago. I need you to walk over to the fence line right now."
The background air tool died instantly. "David? Your court hearing was in Lansing yesterday. Weren't you supposed to land at Metro twenty minutes from now?"
"My flight got hijacked from under me," I said, keeping my voice low so Diaz, who was leaning against the doorway sipping water from a paper cone, wouldn't interrupt. "Somebody was in the shop, Pete. I need to know if anyone has been inside French Road since yesterday morning."
There was a heavy pause, filled only with the sound of Pete’s boots scuffing over crushed gravel. The sound of a metal gate latch rattled through the receiver.
"I was going to call you when you landed," Pete said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its shop-floor gravel. "Yesterday around four in the afternoon, Raymond Cross’s son Leonard pulled into your gravel drive with two guys in a white Econoline van. They had a yellow commercial locksmith rig behind them."
A cold wire tightened behind my eyes. "Did they break the hasps?"
"Didn't have to," Pete said flatly. "Leonard walked straight up to the side pedestrian door on the loading dock, put a notched brass key into the cylinder, and turned it. They were inside for twenty minutes. They didn't touch the CNC mills or the bridge crane. When they came out, Leonard was carrying your dad’s green metal file box—the one Arthur kept locked in the bottom drawer of the roll-top desk."
My father's mechanical pencil hadn't been picked up at a flea market. Leonard Cross had raided the empty shop the moment Judge Keller dismissed their probate claim in Lansing, using an old shop key Raymond had duplicated before the partnership dissolved. They had taken the brass pencil, the lockbox, and the corporate records, but they were still missing the certified original court decree bearing the embossed red wax seal of the appellate judge.
Without that document, the register of deeds could not accept an assignment. But if an impostor presented my driver's license, my father's corporate seal, and an emergency affidavit of lost title before I arrived, the clerk would stamp the filing and place the property into escrow liquidation.
"Pete," I said, my teeth clenched tight against the receiver. "Chain your lowboy trailer across my front gate. Weld the hitch if you have to. Don't let anything on wheels past the ditch line until I get there."
"Consider it blocked," Pete said. "Where are you?"
"O'Hare. All the connecting regional flights are grounded. I'm taking the interstate."
I hung up, folded Ramos's stamped incident log into my breast pocket, and zipped my heavy canvas coat.
"You have another option, son," Ramos said, leaning forward on his elbows. He tapped the telephone console on his desk. "I can walk you over to the federal security office in Terminal 1. We notify the airport detachment at Detroit Metro. When Flight 418 touches down in forty minutes, Wayne County sheriff's deputies pull that man out of the jet bridge and take him into federal holding for identity theft."
"And what happens to my bag?" I asked.
"The airline impounds it as evidence in an active felony inquiry," Ramos answered honestly. "They inventory the contents, log the lockbox, seal the tools, and hold the luggage in an evidence vault until a federal magistrate signs a release order. It takes two weeks. Minimum."
"Two weeks means the statutory recording window expires at nine tomorrow morning," I said, lifting the canvas duffel and throwing the strap over my collarbone. "Raymond Cross gets an automatic default transfer. By the time your federal magistrate unseals that toolbox, the wrecking ball will already be through the brick wall of my father's shop."
Ramos looked at Diaz, then down at the carbon copy remaining in his logbook. He didn't reach for his holster. He didn't tell me to sit back down.
"I-94 East through Gary is already freezing over," Ramos said quietly. "The lake-effect band hit Michigan City twenty minutes ago. If you spin out in LaPorte County, you don't make Detroit at all."
"Then I won't spin out," I said.
I turned my back on the substation and pushed through the heavy security door into the main concourse. Outside the towering glass curtain walls of the terminal, the rain had turned into dense, driving pellets of sleet, bouncing off the wings of grounded airliners like buckshot.
I took the moving walkway down to the ground transportation level, pulling my wallet from my coat as I approached the rental counters. The big corporate boards—Hertz, Avis, National—were completely blacked out, their agents turning away crowds of stranded passengers with printed cards explaining the regional winter storm advisory.
At the far end of the row, beneath a flickering yellow neon sign, a local commercial fleet desk had a handwritten cardboard sign taped to the Plexiglas divider: ONE UTILITY CARGO VAN ONLY. CASH DEPOSIT REQUIRED.