The controller was already programmed with Naomi's address.
Beside it, folded into the compartment, was a list. Simone unfolded it carefully, and June leaned in to read over her shoulder, and I leaned in too, even though I knew I was not supposed to touch anything. The list contained fourteen homes. Fourteen addresses in Brookhaven, in streets I knew, in a neighborhood I had lived in for years. Beside each address was a schedule, written in the same neat handwriting as the memory cards. When residents left for work. When children returned from school. Which homes contained dogs, and what kind, and whether the dogs were kept inside during the day. Which families owned firearms, and where, as far as the list could tell, those firearms were kept. And which doors could be unlocked remotely through smart-home systems, listed not as a question but as a fact, as if someone had already tested them.
I read my own address on that list, and then Helen's, and then addresses I recognized from streets nearby, and I felt the ground tilt under me in a way that had nothing to do with standing on a driveway. This was no longer surveillance, if it had ever been only surveillance. Surveillance watches. This prepared. This measured the exact conditions under which a house could be entered quietly, at the right hour, with the right door already unlocked and the right alarm already silenced. Someone had turned our routines, our dogs, our children coming home from school, into a set of instructions.
Simone said it before I could find the words for it myself. Three homes on the list had already been robbed. In each case, she told us, the alarm had failed. There had been no forced entry, no broken window, no pried door, nothing for a homeowner to point to and say that someone had broken in. The doors had simply opened, or had already been open, and the alarm had simply not sounded, and by the time anyone realized what had happened, the people who did it were gone. The next morning, in each case, a BrightCurrent technician had arrived and blamed voltage fluctuations. A technical explanation, delivered by a man in a uniform, accepted by people who had no reason to know that the same company had put the device on their roof that made the robbery possible.
I thought about those three families, people I did not know by name, and I thought about how they must have stood in their own living rooms the morning after, looking at empty shelves and open drawers, listening to a technician explain that the power had fluctuated and the alarm had missed a signal, and believing him, because what else were they supposed to believe. I thought about Helen, who had not believed, and who had climbed onto my roof four times because believing the easy explanation would have meant letting it continue.
I turned to Travis. He was standing very still now, with Simone between him and the road and June between him and his truck, and his hands were at his sides, and his face had gone the color of someone who has run out of sentences. I said the words slowly, because I wanted him to hear every one of them, and because I wanted to hear them myself, spoken out loud in my own driveway, where they could not be taken back.
"You used my roof to watch the neighborhood."
Travis said nothing. He did not deny it. He did not explain it. He did not look at me. He looked at the ground, at the replacement panel, at the list still in Simone's hands, at anywhere except the face of the man whose roof he had used. His silence was worse than any denial would have been, because a denial would have meant he still believed he had a story to tell. Silence meant he knew the story was over.
Simone turned back to the truck. She opened the cab door, and she took out a laptop, and she carried it to the hood of her own car, and she opened it there, where we could all see the screen. Most of the folders on it were encrypted, locked behind passwords she did not yet have, and she did not try to force them. She did not need to. One directory was already open, as if Travis had left it open in a hurry, or as if he had been looking at it when he drove into my driveway. The directory was called LIVE PROPERTIES.