Chapter 3 - The Corrupt Connection

I stood completely still on my patio.

I could not believe what I was witnessing.

The city inspector, a man who was supposed to uphold the law impartially, was laughing with the woman who had just vandalized my property.

I walked over to the boundary line and demanded to know what was going on.

The inspector looked at me with cold, indifferent eyes.

He informed me that the orange stakes were invalid because the surveyor I hired had supposedly let his state license expire just three days ago.

I knew for a fact that the surveyor was fully licensed when I spoke to his office.

Vanessa smiled her tight, arrogant smile and told me that she always ensures her construction projects follow the strictest legal guidelines.

She was mocking me right to my face.

I returned to my home office and immediately started doing background research on the city inspector.

It did not take me long to find out that his wife was a senior partner at the exact same real estate firm where Vanessa worked.

Vanessa was using her professional connections to manipulate the local government and railroad my property rights.

I realized that playing by the local rules was not going to work anymore.

I needed someone who could not be bought or influenced by a small-town real estate agency.

I spent three hours calling surveying firms two counties over until I found a massive, corporate engineering company willing to take the job.

They charged me triple the normal rate, but they promised to use satellite GPS data and official state county records to establish an undeniable boundary.

The next afternoon, the new surveyor arrived with a truck full of advanced digital equipment.

He set up a tripod, calibrated his lasers, and cross-referenced the coordinates with the county clerk's live database.

I walked out to meet him, expecting him to confirm my five inches of cedar.

Instead, the surveyor looked up from his tablet with a pale, deeply concerned expression on his face.

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He turned the screen toward me so I could see the digital map.

According to the official county records updated at midnight, my entire backyard now legally belonged to Vanessa Reed.