Chapter 5

The license in my wallet says ELIAS WARD, 1142 Ferris Street, Austin, Texas. It's been in there since 2019.

Ruben looked at it. Desmond didn't.

"Anybody can be named anything," Desmond said.

And that was the problem, and he knew it, and he laid it down into the room like a winning hand. "A license proves a name. It doesn't prove a life. Anybody can walk into a DPS office and walk out as Elias Ward. It's Texas. It isn't hard."

"You could call somebody," I said.

"Call who?"

Good question. That's the thing nobody understands about being forgotten. There's no number you dial. There's no office. When a company decides you never existed, you don't get a hearing. You get a sentence on a website, and then you get twenty years.

I could have said: call the patent office. Call the machine shop on East Fifth that's been gone since 1994. Call Ruthie Alvarez, who stitched that seat and died in 2006 and whose name is on a photo caption in a box of vendor receipts.

I said none of it. It would have sounded like a man building a story.

Desmond turned to the room.

"I'm going to give this gentleman one chance to leave quietly," he said. "Because I don't think he's a thief. I think he's a man who used to work here, or knew somebody who did, and he's had a rough few years and he wanted one night where he mattered. I've seen it before." He spread his hands. "But the bike is worth two point four million dollars, and it goes on a plane Monday, and I can't have him near it. That's not personal. That's my job."

It was a good speech. I want that on the record. It was better than anything I could have said, because it was generous, and generosity is very hard to argue with.

Three people near the champagne table nodded.

Marisol Vega didn't nod. But she didn't argue either.

And Vivian Cross was standing at the corner of the platform with her phone held against her chest, and I watched a very smart young woman decide, in real time, that she did not know what to believe.

That's when I should have gone. I had the key back in my hand. I could have walked out into the cool and let the story be about a crazy old man, and I would have slept fine.

Instead I looked at Desmond Pike and said, "Before you call anybody - ask him where the build plate went."