"Those are mine," she said again. "I hung them last night at ten o'clock. I hand-wash my delicates, I always have, Mother did too, and I hang them out because the dryer ruins them. And this morning at a quarter to six I looked out of my upstairs window and saw a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt at my clothesline, and I saw him go through that gap and into that shed." She pointed at me. Not at the shed. At me. "And I have been telling this association for a year that there is something not right about a grown man who points cameras at his neighbors' yards."
"The cameras are pointed at an owl box," I said.
It came out exactly as stupid as it looks written down.
Alvarado-Pike looked up at the dome on the post. She looked at the owl box. She looked back at me with an expression of perfect professional neutrality, which was somehow worse than skepticism.
"You have cameras," she said. "Good. Do they record?"
"Yes. Everything. Continuously." I was already getting my phone out, fumbling the code twice. "It'll show you. Whoever put that there, it'll show you. Hold on."
I should say here that my security system is not normal. I know that. My ex-wife Lydia used to call it the Overbeck Observatory. There are six cameras: two on the front of the house covering the porch and the driveway, one on the garage, one on the side yard looking down the fence line toward the back, the 4K pan-tilt-zoom dome on the owl post, and a weatherproof 4K trail camera bolted low to the back corner of the shed, pointed at the gap underneath it. They record to a network recorder in my hall closet, which keeps thirty days of full-resolution material on two big drives. I built it the spring before for a reason that I'll get to, a reason that had absolutely nothing to do with my neighbors, and I'd spent more money on it than I'd spent on my car.
But the app on my phone, when you scroll back through the timeline, doesn't show you the full-resolution recording. It shows you what's called the substream: a little low-bitrate copy that loads fast over a cell connection. I knew that. I'd known it for a year and a half. I did not think about it once, standing in my backyard with a police officer at each shoulder and my neighbor in her bathrobe across the fence.
I pulled up the side-yard camera. I dragged the timeline back to 5:30 a.m. The image on my phone was gray and soft, the infrared night mode turning everything into charcoal smudges. The fence. The roses, a dark lump. The corner of the shed.
At 5:41, a figure came into the frame from the direction of the rose gap.
It was a person in a gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood up. It was carrying something pale at its side. It walked to my shed, opened the door, stepped half inside, stepped back out, closed the door, and walked out of frame the way it had come. The whole thing took nineteen seconds. On my phone's little screen, at that resolution, in infrared, the person had no face. It was a gray shape with a smaller gray shape for a head.
"There," Sheryl said, and her voice cracked with something I took, then, for vindication. "There he is. That's him. That's his sweatshirt."
Moreland turned to me. "Sir, do you own a gray hooded sweatshirt?"