June was listening too, and June was doing what good officers do, which is to ask the next question instead of the last one. She asked Helen about the technician, about who had been maintaining my system, because if there was a network and a central relay and a camera under panel six, then somebody had put those things there and somebody had been keeping them running. Helen did not hesitate. She had been waiting for that question too.
June turned to me then, and her question was simple and direct. She wanted to know which technician maintained my system. I answered without thinking, because there was only one name to give. "Travis Morrow," I said. It was the name on the work orders. It was the name of the man who had come to my house after each incident, the man who had repaired the damage Helen caused and restored the system to full power, the man who had, each time, brought the feed back online without ever telling me there was a feed at all.
June's expression changed when she heard the name. I noticed it the way you notice a door closing in another room, a small shift in the air that tells you something has changed even before you know what it is. She did not explain right away. She looked at Helen, and then she looked at me, and then she looked back at Helen, and I understood that the name Travis Morrow meant something to her that it did not yet mean to me.
What it meant, June told us, was that three homes in a neighboring county had reported suspicious devices hidden inside BrightCurrent installations. Three homes. Three families who had found something inside their solar systems that should not have been there, something that did not belong to the panels or the wiring or the inverter. The company had an explanation ready for each one, the same kind of explanation companies always have ready. The boxes, BrightCurrent claimed, measured roof temperature. That was all. A temperature sensor. A harmless little box doing a harmless little job.
But June said the rest of it quietly, and the quietness was worse than any accusation. No equipment remained in place long enough for investigators to examine it. Each device disappeared before authorities arrived. Someone got there first, every time, and took the box away, and by the time anyone with a badge and a warrant showed up, there was nothing left to look at except a roof and a story about temperature. The pattern was the same as the pattern on my roof. Damage, repair, disappearance. Complaint, explanation, empty space. The company always had an answer, and the answer always arrived before the evidence did.
I thought about Travis then, about the man who had stood in my yard after each repair and told me the system was fine, the man who had looked at my damaged panels and shaken his head at vandals he never named. I thought about how quickly he had always arrived, how he had always seemed to know exactly what was wrong before he climbed the ladder. I had assumed that was competence. I had assumed that was what a good technician did. Standing on my lawn with red paint drying on my roof and handcuffs on my neighbor's wrists, I began to understand that it might have been something else entirely, and that understanding made me feel cold in a way the morning air had not.
Helen was still standing there, calm, waiting, her hands cuffed in front of her, her eyes on my house and then on hers, as if she were still listening for a signal only she could hear. She had told us about the livestream and the fourteen signals and the central relay and the technician, and each piece fit against the next piece the way the pieces of a roof fit together, tight and overlapping, leaving no gap for doubt to get in. I did not yet know about the truck that was about to turn into my driveway. I did not yet know that Travis Morrow himself was about to arrive, uncalled, with a replacement panel already labeled with my address, and that his arrival would turn everything Helen had just told me from a story into something I could watch happen with my own eyes.