the divorce — was gone. He didn't know when he'd get in the water again.
The thought made him angrier than the syringe had. Anger, he was learning,
was easier to carry than fear, and far more useful.
He exported the footage instead. Four cameras, three hours each, copied to
an encrypted drive with checksums, the way he'd been trained to preserve
digital evidence back when his job involved catching people who thought
deleting a file meant it was gone. It was past one in the morning when he
finished, and he sat in the blue glow of the monitor and thought about Diane
Holloway's face on the tablet screen that afternoon — the collapse, the "turn
that off" — and he felt no satisfaction in it at all. Just a cold, tired clarity.
Detective Ellen Marsh came to the house on Monday morning, alone, with a
paper coffee cup and no notebook visible — which Tom, who noticed things,
understood to mean this conversation was background, not statement.
"Walk me through the history," she said, sitting at his kitchen table while
Chloe got ready for school upstairs. "Not Saturday. Everything before
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Saturday. I want to understand what kind of relationship you two had."
Tom laughed, a short sound with no humor in it. "Relationship is a strong
word."
"Then give me the weak version."
So Tom told her. Two years of it. The citations had started six months after
he moved in — grass a quarter-inch over limit, a trash can visible from the
street for forty minutes past the deadline, the basketball hoop Chloe had
gotten for her tenth birthday deemed "aesthetically non-conforming." Tom
still remembered that one with particular bitterness: he'd spent a whole
Saturday assembling the hoop with Chloe handing him bolts, and three days
later the citation arrived, and Chloe had cried — not about the hoop, but
because she'd overheard Diane tell another board member that "some people
buy their way into neighborhoods they don't understand."
Then the cameras: Diane had made them her personal crusade, raising it at
three consecutive meetings, calling them "excessive" and "intrusive,"
suggesting — in that careful HOA language — that a single father with four
cameras might have "concerning motivations." Tom had installed them after
a package theft. Diane had made it sound like something else. At the last
meeting, she'd actually proposed a rule requiring residents to "register"
exterior cameras with the board, and Tom had stood up — he never spoke at
meetings, he hated speaking at meetings — and said, "My cameras point at
my property, Diane. If you don't want to be on them, don't come onto my
property." The room had gone very quiet. Diane had smiled her thin smile
and said, "Noted."
"And the assessments?" Marsh asked.
Tom blinked. "How did you—"
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"I'm a detective, Mr. Beckett. I read the file Brandt sent over, and then I read
the HOA's public filings, and three special assessments in two years caught
my eye. Did you ever question them?"
"Once. At the spring meeting last year. I asked why GreenLine Landscaping
kept getting the contracts without bids, and what exactly the drainage
remediation money had paid for, since the drainage ditch behind my house
still floods every April." Tom rubbed his face. "Diane said the board had 'full
confidence' in its vendors and moved on. Two weeks later I got cited for the
cameras again. And then again."
Marsh was quiet for a moment. "Did you ever put any of that in writing?"
"Emails. I have them all." Tom met her eyes. "Detective, are you asking me
if I think this is about money?"
"I'm asking you to keep thinking," Marsh said, standing. "And to send me
those emails." At the door she paused. "One more thing. Has she ever been
inside your house? Your yard? Before Saturday."
"Never. She wouldn't come within ten feet of me at meetings."
Marsh nodded like that confirmed something, and left, and Tom stood in the
doorway watching her car pull away and thought about the word she'd used.
Relationship. As if what Diane Holloway had with him was a relationship
and not a two-year campaign.
That evening, Marsh and Detective Okafor knocked on Diane Holloway's
door.
Tom learned about it later, from Marsh herself, in the retelling that would
become part of the case file. But he imagined it easily enough, because he
had known Diane Holloway for two years, and he knew exactly what
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performance she would give.
She answered the door in pressed slacks and a silk blouse, her hair coiffed,
the blonde helmet back in place, and her first words were concern.
Genuine-sounding concern. "Detectives? Is something wrong? Is someone
hurt?"
Marsh was forty-eight, with gray threading her dark hair and eyes that had
seen every version of this conversation. Okafor was younger and quieter and
took notes without looking up. They stood on Diane's porch — a porch Tom
had never been invited onto — and Marsh said they were following up on an
incident that afternoon at 14 Larkspur Lane.
Diane's hand went to her throat. "Oh no. Is Tom all right?"
"He's fine," Marsh said. "He reported that you climbed over his locked fence
this afternoon and placed a syringe under his poolside towel."
The silence that followed was, according to Okafor's notes, exactly four
seconds long.
Then Diane laughed — a short, disbelieving sound. "That's absurd. I was
conducting a routine exterior inspection. The association has authority—"
"Over a locked seven-foot fence?" Marsh asked pleasantly. "In a swimsuit?"
"I was at my pool before," Diane said quickly. "I didn't change. And the gate
— the side gate is often left unlatched, I've told him about it repeatedly—"
"The gate was padlocked," Okafor said without looking up from his
notebook. "We checked."
Diane's smile thinned. "Then I must have — I may have used the fence. The
latch was stuck. It hardly matters. The point is, I noticed something
suspicious near his pool during my inspection, and I was securing it."
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"You secured a syringe by hiding it under his towel?" Marsh asked.