Debra told her. The bath. The Friday night. Twenty to ten. The blinking red light. She told it the same way she'd told it at the meeting, nearly word for word, and in the bright afternoon, without forty people around her, it sounded different. It sounded rehearsed. Her hands, holding the folder, were shaking the way they'd shaken in the clubhouse.
The second unit pulled in about ten minutes later, a corporal named Aranda, broad and slow-moving, with a gray mustache and reading glasses he kept pushing up onto his head. Hendricks briefed him in the street, out of earshot. He nodded, and looked up at the north side of my garage, and looked up at the north side of the Pelletiers' house, and then he did something I liked him for immediately. He walked into my side yard, all the way down it to my gate, and turned around, and stood where my camera had been pointing, and looked up.
"That the window?" he said. "Second floor, the frosty one?"
"That's my bathroom," Debra said from the edge of her lawn.
"Huh," Aranda said, and pushed his glasses up onto his head, and pulled them back down.
I asked if I could show them something. Hendricks said I could, and that she'd come with me, and Aranda stayed outside with Debra. I took Hendricks into my house, through the kitchen, and down the stairs to my basement office, and I turned on the light, and I showed her the recorder.
"The cameras don't keep anything," I said. "They just see. Everything they see comes down the wire to this box. He cut the wires. That's all he did. Everything up to the second he cut them is still here."
Hendricks looked at the recorder, a gray box the size of a hardcover book, blinking a little blue light, and I watched her understand. "So whoever wanted those cameras gone," she said slowly, "ripped down the wrong thing."