There was a knock on the open front door, and Priya came in, in her work clothes still, a little out of breath, with her bar card in her hand like she'd been holding it since she got out of the car.
"Priya Raman," she said. "I'm Ms. Haskett's attorney, and Ruth Pruitt's, in the civil matter. I'm sorry I'm late." She took one look at Karen and then at the binder on the table and then at Reyes. "I see we've reached tab twelve."
* * *
What followed took another hour and a half, and much of it was dull in the way important things often are.
I walked the officers through the binders. Binder one: my archive. Each of the eleven escalator households, every photo on every notice we'd been able to gather, set beside my own frames from the claimed date and from the season the HOA's photo must actually have been taken. Ruth's dead July lawn beside its bare buckeye and copper-pale pin oak and February excavator. Gus's June garage door with its pink April redbud. Mrs. Truong's "unmaintained landscaping" in August, with snow — actual snow — in the shadow of her porch steps. The Sandovals' "unapproved fence repair" with the black walnut behind it in full green leaf in a notice dated December. The trees, over and over, telling the time.
Binder two: the legal filing, the property chain, Copperline, Brent Kessler's address in Powell, the sheriff's sale of Lorraine Bickel's house.
Binder three, the thinnest: Hal's affidavit about the account, and the HOA financial statements showing four thousand a year in fines, and our tally from the canvass — sixty-one thousand and change — and the HOA's letter, over Karen's signature, stating that no separate account existed.
Mulcahy, it turned out, could read a bank statement. He'd spent six years, he said, on a property-crimes unit before his knees gave out and he went back on patrol. He turned the pages of binder three slowly, with one blunt finger, and at the end he said, "Huh," in exactly the way Gus had said it at the pin oak, and I liked him a great deal for it.
"Most of this isn't ours," Reyes said finally. She said it to me and to Priya, carefully. "The fraud stuff, the HOA money, the property — that's for the detectives and the prosecutor. It's a big case. They'll want to do it right."
"We have an appointment with Economic Crimes on Tuesday," Priya said. "They have the filing."
"Good." Reyes turned to Karen. Karen had at some point sat down on the very edge of my sofa, her phone face-down in her lap, as if it were a small, hot animal. "Mrs. Whitcombe. You called 911's non-emergency line and reported that Ms. Haskett photographed you through your window while you were undressed. Based on what I've seen tonight — including the photographs you showed me — I don't believe that happened. I'm documenting that in my report. In Ohio, knowingly making a false report to law enforcement is a crime. So is using it to harass someone." She paused. "And some of the photographs you showed me were taken of Ms. Haskett inside her fenced yard and inside her home, without her knowledge. I'm documenting that too, and I'm going to ask you to send me the original files, not screenshots. All of them. Tonight."