She stood there in my basement office under the one bare bulb and I watched her put it together, or start to. I watched her decide not to finish putting it together yet, too, because she had a complaint in front of her and a procedure to follow, and the procedure said that a woman had accused a man of filming her in her bath and that you investigated the accusation in front of you before you went chasing the one you wished you had.
We went back up. Aranda was standing in my side yard with a tape measure he'd borrowed out of my truck, and Debra was standing on her side of the line with her arms folded. I said, "Corporal, I've got something better than a tape," and I went to my truck and got my total station, which is the instrument surveyors use to measure angles and distances, a yellow box on a tripod with a telescope on top, and I set it up on my gravel at the base of my garage wall, right under the empty bracket, and I leveled it. Debra watched me do it with her mouth set. I don't think she'd ever seen me work before. I don't think she'd known what that word on my truck meant.
I shot the bottom of the bracket. Eight feet, seven inches above grade. I shot the sill of her bathroom window across the side yard. Fifteen feet, two inches. Horizontal distance from my wall to hers: thirteen feet, one inch. I wrote it on the back of a job sheet and handed it to Aranda and explained it like I'd explain it to a jury, which I have done, twice.
"To see the bottom of her window from where my camera was," I said, "the camera would have to be tilted up at about twenty-seven degrees above level. That's not even the middle of the window. That's the very bottom edge. The camera's field of view, top to bottom, is fifty-four degrees. It was tilted down thirty-three. Which means the very top of what it could see was six degrees below level. At thirteen feet, that's about seven feet two inches up her wall. That's the top of her dryer vent. That's what you can see in the footage. Her window is eight feet higher than that."
Aranda looked at the numbers on the job sheet for a long time. "So you'd have to aim this thing thirty-some degrees higher than it was ever aimed."
"Thirty-three just to get it level," I said. "Sixty to get the sill. And then you'd be looking through pebbled glass."
"Frosted," Debra said from her side of the line. Her voice was thin. "It's frosted, it's not completely—you can see shapes. You can see shapes."
"Ma'am," Aranda said, gently, "I'm not saying anything yet."