"When you put up the cameras, nothing happened at first. People forget. They get used to things. She'd been on your porch on camera a dozen times in April just walking by. Then in May they opened your account and a box came to your house." Solberg looked at me. "Your doorbell would have seen her take it. It's not on your recorder anymore. Forty days. But she didn't know that. She figured it was on there forever. In the cloud, or in the camera, wherever she thought it lived. And when that bank froze your account in June, she got a message from the ring telling her not to ship anything with your name on it. Flagged. So she didn't. She just kept it. That laptop was sitting in her spare room for two months, with your name on the label, because she couldn't figure out how to get rid of it."
"Why not just throw it away?"
"I asked her that," Solberg said. "She said it was a two-thousand-dollar computer. She said she couldn't make herself put a two-thousand-dollar computer in the trash." She shrugged. "People are funny about what they won't do."
And then Folasade lost her blood pressure cuff, and Debra unplugged my driveway camera to take it, which was the first time she'd done anything like that, the first time she'd had to. I think it scared her. I think she stood at that outlet on the front of my house with her tote bag and understood that she was now the kind of person who sneaks onto a neighbor's lawn to pull a plug. And that same night I posted that I'd be going back through all my footage, carefully, over the weekend, looking for a pattern. And three days later there was an emergency amendment. Recording equipment and stored media, surrendered to the board for secure disposal.
"Why the bath?" I asked Solberg. It was the only thing I still couldn't make sense of. "Why that? Why not just say the camera was pointed at her yard? It would have been easier."
Solberg thought about it. "Because nobody asks you to prove that," she said finally. "If you say a man was looking into your yard, people say, show me. If you say a man was looking at you in the bath, people don't ask to see anything. They just believe you, or they don't, and most of them do, because the alternative is that you're the kind of person who'd say that if it weren't true. It's the one accusation where asking for evidence makes you look like a creep." She shook her head. "She picked a night she knew you were home. Your truck was in the driveway. She just didn't think about the van."
"She looked right at my camera," I said. "That night. While she was loading it."
"I know," said Solberg. "I've watched it about thirty times. I think that's the moment she decided."