Because here is the thing nobody tells you about a moment like that when you are a twenty-nine-year officer at a desk.

The temptation is enormous.

You have been doing parking complaints for four years and something real has walked through the door, and everything in you wants to work it — start making calls, start looking things up, start being the one who figures it out.

And that impulse is how these cases die.

Because if I had spent the next twenty minutes on the computer being a detective, I would not have been standing at that counter when a black SUV came into the lot at 4:31, and I might have handed two children to the man driving it, because he had a very good explanation and he was extremely calm and he was their legal father.

So I want to list, for anybody who reads this, the four things I did not do.