Simone closed the laptop at last, and she looked at me, and she asked me if I understood what she had found, and I said yes, even though understanding it and believing it were two different things, and I was still working on the second one. She told me that the investigation into BrightCurrent already existed, and that my house was now part of it, and that what she had found in my driveway would be added to a file that already contained other houses, other devices, other families who had been told about voltage fluctuations the morning after they were robbed. She did not promise me that it would be quick, and she did not promise me that it would be simple, and I respected her for not promising either of those things, because nothing about that morning had been quick or simple, and I did not want to be lied to by one more person in a uniform.
I looked up at my roof, at the red streaks still drying in the morning sun, and for the first time since the vandalism began, I did not see damage. I saw the reason the evidence had survived long enough for Simone to find it, and for June to see it, and for me to finally understand what had been happening above my head while I slept, while I worked nights, while my daughter did her homework in a room with a camera pointed at her door. The paint was ugly. The paint was also the only thing that had kept the truth from being repaired away one more time.
Naomi came running from Helen's house with an old tablet clutched, and the first thing I noticed was that she was not looking at the roof anymore. She was looking at the screen, pale. She stopped at the edge of my driveway and held the tablet out toward Simone like it might burn her if she kept holding it alone.
"The link is back."
Simone took it from her with both hands, the way you take something fragile and dangerous at the same time. I moved closer, and Helen moved closer, and June stepped in beside us so that all four of us crowded around a screen that should not have been showing anything. The panel six device was sitting in an evidence bag on the hood of a patrol car. Its light was off. Simone had disconnected it herself, in front of all of us. And yet the feed was live.
It no longer showed Naomi's bedroom. It showed my driveway. It showed all of us standing in my driveway, seen from somewhere high and close, and the angle made my skin crawl. The camera was not looking across the street. It was looking down at us from above my garage.
Helen leaned in until her face was inches from the screen. She studied the angle, and then she said the thing I did not want to hear.
"The signal is getting stronger."
I stared at her. "Stronger than what?"
She did not answer right away. She tilted the tablet slightly, watching the feed shift, and her eyes narrowed.
"The camera isn't on the roof anymore."
"Then where is it?" I asked, and my voice came out louder than I meant it to, because I already knew the answer was going to be inside the place where I slept.
Helen looked toward my house. She did not point. The front door stood open from when Travis had tried to walk toward the road, and beyond it the hallway lay dark and ordinary, the way it had always looked, except now it did not look ordinary at all.
"It's inside."
June moved before anyone else did. She stepped back from the tablet and raised her voice, firmly.
"Everybody away from the doors," she said. "Now. Step back onto the driveway. Nobody goes inside."