True to his word, he picked up his now-working desk phone and made a call. "Yeah, it's Davis. I need a crew out at Serenity Springs. No, not for a bust. I need a construction guy. Someone who knows digging. Yeah, right now. It's an infrastructure issue."
An hour later, a beat-up Ford F-150 that looked like it had personally survived several apocalypses pulled up to the curb. The logo on the side, faded and caked with mud, read: Digs-A-Lot Construction.
A large man with a magnificent beer belly, a coffee-stained shirt, and the easygoing confidence of someone who had seen it all hopped out. This was Dave.
Davis, Miller, and I met him at the crime scene: Brenda's petunia bed. I had been forced to stick around as their "technical consultant," which mostly meant I stood there trying to look useful while enjoying the show.
"All right, Sarge, what's the emergency?" Dave asked, taking a sip from a giant thermos. He looked at the severed orange cable on the ground. "Oh."
He knelt down, his knees cracking audibly. He examined the cut for no more than five seconds.
"Oh yeah," he said, nodding with the authority of a seasoned pro. "That's a clean cut. Did that with a pair of $50 anvil loppers from Home Depot. See the pinch marks on the sheathing here? No way that was a shovel. A shovel mangles. This was personal." He pointed a thick finger at the soft dirt of the flower bed. "And look here. Footprints. Small ones, size seven, maybe. See the tread pattern? That's a woman's gardening clog. I'd bet my lunch on it."
Davis looked at me. I just shrugged and smiled. Dave, the Digs-A-Lot guy, had just done more effective forensic work in thirty seconds than a whole CSI team.
"All right," Davis grunted. "Let's go have a chat."
The four of us—a grim-faced sergeant, a nervous rookie, a smug network architect, and a folksy construction expert—made our way up Brenda's perfectly swept walkway. It felt like the weirdest posse in history.
Davis knocked firmly on the door. A moment later, it swung open to reveal Brenda herself. She was holding a small, elegant watering can, and she had a beatific smile on her face—the smile of a benevolent ruler surveying her perfect kingdom.
"Sergeant," she chirped, her voice dripping with condescending sweetness. "To what do I owe the pleasure? I was just about to file another report about the Hendersons' unapproved wind chimes. The dissonance is simply dreadful for the neighborhood's feng shui."
"Ma'am," Davis began, his voice flat and devoid of emotion, "we need to talk to you about the internet outage."