"Whoever wanted those cameras gone," I said, "thought the footage lived in the camera."
I pulled up the side-yard camera. The last thing it had recorded was a sunburned forearm, very close, and then a great lurch of blue sky and stucco as the camera came off its mount, and then nothing. I backed it up. Two in the afternoon on July 24. Then twenty-four hours before that. Then the night of Friday, July 18, at 9:30 p.m.
The frame was exactly what Maisie had set in April. Gravel path, trash cans, gate. A slice of the Pelletiers' first-floor wall above the gate, the bottom lip of the dryer vent. It was night, and the image was in color, washed amber by the Pelletiers' pole light, and the shadows of the honey locust were moving a little across the gravel in the wind. That was all. That was the whole world as seen by that camera at twenty to ten on the night of July 18.
"It's in color," Hendricks said.
"That's the second thing I wanted to show you." I explained it as well as Maisie had explained it to me. Most of these cameras, at night, switch on infrared lights, little LEDs in a ring around the lens. You can't really see infrared, but cheap ones glow a dull red, and they make the picture go black and white. But the infrared on that side camera had bounced off my aluminum downspout and blown out half the image, so Maisie had turned it off and told the camera to use the light that was already there, which was the Pelletiers' pole light. "If the infrared was on," I said, "the footage would be black and white. It's not. So there was no red light. No glow. Nothing. And there's no status light. She turned that off too."
"Your daughter."
"Fifteen," I said. "She saved the settings. She's got a file with the exact angle it was aimed at in April, which is the exact angle it's aimed at here." I pulled up the side-yard footage from every week back to the start of what the recorder had, all forty days, and I let her scrub through it herself. Same frame. Every day. Same gate, same cans, same dryer vent. If I had moved that camera, even an inch, she'd have seen the frame jump.
She watched for a long time. Then she said, "Okay." Just that. And she took out her phone and photographed the screen, and asked if I could export it for her, and I said I already had a thumb drive ready.