Priya also sent, the same afternoon, a letter with a copy of the whole thing to the Economic Crimes Unit of the Delaware County Prosecuting Attorney. We had an appointment there the following Tuesday.
The HOA's attorney — a collections firm from Dublin that handled liens for associations all over central Ohio and, Priya said, probably hadn't looked very hard at what their client had sent them — would have been served electronically with the filing that evening. It's reasonable to assume that he forwarded it to his client.
Karen Whitcombe, in other words, opened her email on the evening of Tuesday, October 7, and found herself in Exhibit 7.
Forty-eight hours later, two police officers were standing on my porch.
* * *
I should tell you about the window.
On the Wednesday morning, October 8 — a Wednesday because Tuesday had been the filing and I'd been at Priya's office until late — I walked the loop alone. Gus had a cardiologist appointment. It was a bright, cold morning, the first real frost, the lawns furred white and the sky that hard, rinsed blue you get in October in Ohio. At WH-5, the spicebush stand along the greenway behind my own back fence, I set up my shot: bearing 340, north-northwest, toward the pond, the spicebush leaves going butter-yellow, the berries red as nail polish.
I took the picture, and I lowered the camera, and for some reason I turned around.
The greenway runs behind the back lots of Larkspur. My lot backs onto it, and so do Ruth's, and so does Karen's, five houses down, a big two-story Colonial with a cedar deck and a hot tub under a cover. From the greenway you could see the back of every house along that stretch, including the windows on the second floors.
In Karen's upstairs back window, the one at the corner, the blinds were up. Someone was standing in it. And the someone was holding something black and long up to their face, pointed in my direction, and the low morning sun hit the front of the lens and flashed, once, like a signal mirror.
I stood there in the frost. My heart was going hard. I knew exactly what I was looking at, because I'd seen that camera on the passenger seat of the white Lexus a hundred times. And I understood, with the slow, cold clarity of a lab result coming back, that it wasn't the first time. That the blinds had been up before. That the flash had probably come before, too, on other mornings, and I'd never thought to turn around.