The siren had already faded by the time the second car pulled into the street, and I knew from the way it parked, straight behind the patrol car, that this was not another patrol officer coming to take a statement. The woman who stepped out carried a slim case in one hand and a folder in the other, and she moved like someone who had already decided what to do. She introduced herself to June first, not to me, and June nodded the way officers nod when a name they have been waiting for finally arrives in person.
"Simone Park," she said, when June turned her toward me. "County cybercrimes."
She held out the folder, not as a courtesy. Inside was a search authorization, and the language on it tied what she was about to do to an investigation that already existed. BrightCurrent was already under investigation, and my house, my roof, and the man standing beside his truck had just walked into the middle of it. That changed the feeling in the driveway. Before Simone arrived, this had felt like a dispute between neighbors, ugly and personal. After she arrived, it felt like a case, and I was standing inside it whether I wanted to be there or not.
Simone did not look at the red paint first. She looked at Travis, and then at the equipment case sitting open on the ground beside his truck, and then at June.
"Open the rest of it," she said.
Travis had already refused June once, and he tried the same refusal again, but his voice had lost something. He said the equipment belonged to BrightCurrent and was private, and she had no right to go through a technician's tools. Simone did not argue with him about rights. She pointed at the authorization and the case and told him it covered exactly this, and that if he wanted to argue about it, he could argue about it later, in a room with a lawyer, after she had seen what was inside.
June stepped closer. Travis looked at the two of them, and then at Helen, who was still sitting on the curb in handcuffs, watching him with the steady attention of a woman who had been waiting for this exact moment. He opened the case all the way.
I had expected tools. Wrenches, wire strippers, a voltage tester, the ordinary things a solar technician carries. What I saw instead made my stomach tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the damage to my roof. The case was fitted with foam cut into precise shapes, and in those shapes sat rows of miniature cameras, small enough to hide behind a bracket or inside a frame, and wireless receivers no bigger than a matchbox, and memory cards lined up in a plastic holder. Each card had a label written in neat handwriting. Simone lifted them out one by one, reading the labels aloud in a flat voice, as if she were reading a grocery list and not the addresses of people's homes.
My address was on four of them.
Helen's address was on seven.
Another card carried the address of Naomi's school.
I counted them again in my head as she laid them out, because I did not want to believe the first count. Four for my house. Seven for Helen's. One for a school where a sixteen-year-old girl went to class. I looked at Helen, and she did not look surprised. She looked the way a person looks when a suspicion they have carried alone for weeks is finally confirmed in front of witnesses, and the confirmation brings no relief at all, only the weight of knowing they were right.
Travis said the equipment belonged to BrightCurrent's security division. He said it quickly, the way a man says a sentence he has rehearsed, and he kept his eyes on the case instead of on any of us. Simone let him finish, and then she asked him a question so simple that it should have had a simple answer.
"What does the security division protect?"
He did not answer. He opened his mouth, and then he closed it, and then he looked toward his truck, as if the answer might be written somewhere inside it. Simone waited. June waited. Helen waited. The silence stretched until it became its own answer, and I understood, standing there in my own driveway, that whatever this equipment was for, it was not for protecting anyone in this neighborhood.