I stayed three cars back, heart hammering, as the black SUV wove through town and finally turned into the parking lot of a storage facility on the edge of the county. Brandon and the driver got out, glancing over their shoulders, and unlocked a unit near the back. I parked behind a delivery van and watched. Inside the storage unit, even from a distance, I could see stacks of tools, coils of wire, and what looked like blueprints taped to the wall. This was not one desperate young man. This was organized, and my mother’s house was somewhere in the middle of it.

I did the only thing that made sense. I called the police, gave them the address, the plate number, and everything I had seen over the past two days. An officer met me at a gas station down the road twenty minutes later, and I told him about the tape measure, the basement window, the plywood, the crowbar, the glass cutter. He listened, then made a call of his own. When he hung up, his expression had changed. “Ma’am,” he said, “that plate is already connected to an open investigation. You need to tell me everything about your mother’s house, right now.”