My neighbour poured a bucket of red paint over my car at two in the morning because I had her SUV towed. By half past seven there were three police cars outside her house — and then an officer crouched down by my rear bumper, looked at what the paint had eaten through, and told the other one to get me away from the vehicle.

PART 4 — WHAT IT OPENED
I am not going to pretend I understand all of what happened next, because most of it happened in another county and I was told about it in pieces over about fourteen months.

The vehicle was the first physical piece of that case anybody had had since 2019.

There was material in it. I am not going to describe it and I have not been told the detail, and the detective was extremely careful with me about what she said, and I have been careful since.

What I know is that in the February two men were arrested in connection with an operation that had been re-identifying vehicles across four counties, and that in the June one of them was charged in relation to Desta Otieno.

That trial has not happened yet. I have been told I will probably be called about the purchase, and I have a folder.

I was not charged with anything. It was explained to me, twice, that a person who buys a cloned vehicle in good faith with a clean title is not committing an offence, and that it happens to several thousand people a year.

I lost the car. That is how it works. It was evidence and then it was property belonging to an estate, and it was never mine, and the twenty-one thousand four hundred dollars is gone and is not coming back because Curtis does not exist.

My insurer paid nothing, because there was nothing to insure. I had been paying premiums for three years on a vehicle that did not legally exist.

I take a bus to the park-and-ride now and I bought a nine-year-old hatchback in the spring, and I checked that one myself in four separate places before I handed over a dollar.

Verna Dunlop was charged with criminal mischief.

She admitted it in about eleven minutes once they had the can, and she pleaded, and she paid restitution for a car that was not mine to be paid for, which took the county six months to work out and which I have never fully understood.

She has not apologised for the paint and I do not expect her to.

What she did do, in the April, was leave an envelope in my mailbox with a printed page in it and nothing else.

It was the news piece about the arrests. The short one, from the county paper, three paragraphs.

She had underlined one line of it, and the line was the one that mentions that the vehicle was located in Adair County.

No note. Nothing on the envelope.

I have thought about what that was for about two years and I have never asked her.