PART 3 — M R O 7-14
I did not find out what was on that bumper for eleven hours.
Those eleven hours were the strangest of my life and I spent most of them assuming I was in trouble.
They put me in the back of a car. Not under arrest — Officer Behn was clear about that twice and said it in a specific way that I now understand was her being careful — but in the back of a car, on my own street, at twenty to eight in the morning, in a bathrobe, while two more vehicles arrived.
Across the road, Verna Dunlop was being spoken to on her own lawn about a paint can, and neither of us had any idea that the paint can had stopped being the point about four minutes earlier.
I watched her look over at me in the back of that car.
I have wondered what she thought was happening. She has never said and I have never asked.
They took the car. Flatbed, at about half past nine, with a tarp over the back of it, and I stood in a bathrobe on my own drive and watched my SUV leave on a truck.
Then everybody went, and Kestrel Court was empty, and it was ten past ten on a Thursday morning and I had no vehicle and no explanation and a red driveway.
I rang my office and said there had been an incident at home. I rang my sister and could not explain it. I stood in my kitchen and looked up three or four combinations of words that all brought back nothing.
At about two in the afternoon I went out with a hose and a brush and got as far as turning the tap on before I remembered the officer saying don’t wash it, and I stood on that concrete for a while and then went back inside.
Sergeant Lind came back at about eight that evening with a detective from the county and they sat in my kitchen and asked me a great many questions about a private sale I had made three years earlier.
I bought that vehicle from a man off a classifieds site. Twenty-one thousand four hundred dollars. He called himself Curtis and he met me in a supermarket car park in a town forty minutes away and he had the title and the keys and a story about a divorce.
The title was clean. It was a real document with a real VIN on it. The plate came back clean. My insurer wrote it without a blink and I registered it and I drove it for three years and took it for oil changes.
The VIN on that title belonged to a vehicle that was crushed at a salvage yard in 2018.
What I had been driving since then was a different car entirely, carrying that dead car’s identity: plate, title, dash tag, door sticker. It is called cloning and it is not rare and there is an entire industry doing it.
The car I had actually been driving belonged to a man called Desta Otieno.
He was forty-four. He was an HVAC estimator. He was taken off a forecourt on the eleventh of November 2019, at about a quarter past nine at night, in a town about ninety minutes from Loman Falls.
He was k.i.l.l.e.d that night. The vehicle went and was never found.
The investigation ran for about fourteen months and then it did not close but it stopped moving, which the detective explained to me is a different thing and is more common than anybody would like.
Now the letters.
In the July of 2018, Desta Otieno’s daughter Mira, who was ten, scratched her initials into the paint on the rear bumper of her father’s new car with a house key, along with the date, because she had seen somebody do it in a film.
M R O 7-14.
She was in enormous trouble. Her father was, by every account, furious for about two days and then made a joke of it for the next sixteen months and never had it fixed.
It is in the file. Her mother gave a statement in the November of 2019 that lists identifying features of the vehicle, and the last line of that statement mentions a daughter’s initials scratched into the rear bumper on the driver’s side.
Whoever re-identified that car did a proper job. New plate, new tag, new door sticker, a respray at the back where there had been damage.
They filled and coated over a set of scratches on a bumper because they were scratches, and they did it cheaply, and it held for six years.
Until a fifty-eight-year-old retired school secretary poured a bucket of exterior red over my car at thirteen minutes past two in the morning, and it sat on that patch for five hours and ate through the coating
