"I'm sorry," he said finally, very quietly, to the catalogs. "About all of this."
I didn't know what he meant. He might have meant sorry that somebody stole your wife's things. He might have meant sorry the neighborhood is upset. He might have meant something else entirely. He didn't look at me, and I didn't ask, because Rhoda had told me to do nothing, and because there was something in his voice that I didn't want to step on. He walked back up the court to his house with his shoulders up near his ears. I noticed he went in through the garage, not the front door.
On the seventh day, Detective Alondra Quist called me herself.
"Mr. Overbeck. I've had a chance to begin reviewing the drive your attorney sent over."
"Okay."
"I want to see it on the original system," she said. "I want to see the recorder, the camera positions, the angles, the lighting, the logs, all of it in place, before I do anything else. Tomorrow at four work for you?"
"Four is fine."
"Good." There was a pause, and then, in a slightly different voice, she said, "I'll tell you something off the record, Mr. Overbeck. I've been doing this nineteen years. Usually when somebody tells me their camera footage clears them, what they've actually got is a doorbell camera with a smudge on the lens. This is not that."
"No," I said. "It's not."
"See you at four."
On the eighth day, the Tuesday, I cleaned my garage.
I hadn't planned to. I'd planned to sit very still in my kitchen until four o'clock, the way I'd been sitting still for a week. But at noon I found myself sweeping, and then moving the recycling bins, and then hauling the old monitor in from my classroom storage cabinet, a big forty-three-inch display that Renata had let me take home over the summer for Owl Hours planning and that I'd never brought back. I set it up on the workbench. I ran a cable from the hall closet through the laundry room door to the recorder, so that what came up on the screen would be the real thing, straight from the source, at full resolution, the way it had come out of the cameras. I set out two folding chairs. I found I had nothing else to do with my hands.