And this time, she had done something different. This time she had used industrial marking paint, and Simone explained, when I asked, that the paint contained a powder visible under ultraviolet light. Anyone who removed the device would carry traces of it on their hands and on their clothes, traces that could not be washed away quickly and could not be explained away easily. Helen had expected Travis to arrive. She had known he would come, because he always came, and she had wanted police present when he did, so that this time there would be witnesses, and a record, and someone with authority standing in the driveway when the man who maintained the hidden system reached for it again.
I looked at Helen then, really and carefully looked at her, sitting on the curb in handcuffs at seventy-two years old, and I felt something shift in my chest. I had spent nearly two months being angry at a vandal I could not identify, and then being angry at the neighbor I had finally caught in the act, and now I was standing in my driveway learning that the woman in handcuffs had been the only person in this neighborhood who had seen what was happening and tried to stop it.
June walked over to her slowly, and the movement caught my attention because it was so different from the way she had put the handcuffs on. Then, she had been firm and quick, an officer securing a scene. Now, she knelt beside Helen, and she took the key from her belt, and she removed the handcuffs with a slowness that felt deliberate, almost gentle, as if she were undoing something she no longer believed should have been done in the first place. Helen rubbed her wrists once, and she did not thank June, and June did not apologize, and nobody said anything for a moment, because there was nothing simple enough to say that would have fit.
Travis watched all of this, and I watched Travis, and I saw the calculation happening behind his eyes. He was no longer the confident technician who had driven into my driveway uncalled with a replacement panel already labeled. He was a man standing beside an open case full of cameras and memory cards, with a cybercrimes investigator photographing his equipment and a police officer who had just taken the handcuffs off the woman he had come to replace the work of. He took a step toward the road, casual, as if he were simply moving out of the way, and then another step, and I realized he was trying to leave.
Simone blocked him. She did not raise her voice. She did not touch him. She simply stepped into his path and said, "We haven't searched the replacement panel."
Travis stopped. He tried to make it look like he had stopped for another reason, like he was simply waiting to be told where to stand, but I had seen the direction of his feet, and so had Simone, and so had June. Simone did not move out of his path. She pointed toward the truck, toward the replacement panel lying in the back with my address printed on its label, and she told the firefighters to bring it down and open it up. Travis said it was a sealed unit, and that opening it would void a warranty, and that BrightCurrent owned it, and Simone said that if BrightCurrent owned it, then BrightCurrent could explain it later, after she had seen what was inside it.
The firefighters lifted the panel out of the truck with the same care they had used on the roof, and they set it on the driveway on a pair of padded supports, and for a moment nothing happened. Then one of them ran a hand along the frame, and paused, and ran it along again, more slowly, and said something to the other firefighter in a low voice. They tilted the panel, and something inside the frame shifted. Not much. Just enough to be wrong. A panel is supposed to be solid. This one had movement inside it, a small sliding weight where there should have been nothing but glass and wiring and frame.
Simone stepped forward with gloves on, and she worked a seam I could not see from where I stood, and a hidden compartment opened in the frame. Inside it sat another camera, smaller than the one from panel six, and beside it a digital controller, a flat device with a screen dark and a set of buttons worn smooth from use. Simone turned the controller over, and she read the information on it, and her expression changed in a way I had not seen before. She did not look surprised. She looked like a person who had just found the piece of evidence that turns a case from one thing into something much larger.