And that was when I thought of it. Not in a flash; more like a word you've been trying to remember for an hour that just walks up and sits down beside you. I thought of the little blue light behind my rearview mirror, which I hadn't looked at in months, which dimmed to a slow pulse in parking mode, which the reviews said would wake on motion within the cabin and around the car. I thought of the app on my phone with its notifications turned off.
I said, "I have a dashcam."
Ruthanne put her pen down.
"Two lenses," I said. "Front and inside. It records when the car's parked, if anything moves."
"Is the car downstairs?"
"Yes."
"Is the camera on the windshield right now?"
"Yes."
"Is it recording right now?"
"It— I don't know. Probably. It's always on when the car's off. It loops. When the card fills up it records over the oldest—" I stopped. "Oh, God. How big is the card? How long does it keep things?"
"Don't touch it," Ruthanne said. She was already standing, faster than I'd have guessed a woman her size could move, and Judge Wapner lifted his head an inch off the crib mattress in mild disbelief. "Do not touch it, do not open the app, do not do anything. I'm calling a man."
The man was a forensic examiner named Teodor Brask from Columbus, a gaunt man with a gray ponytail and a Cleveland Guardians cap who drove up that afternoon in a minivan full of cases and sat in the passenger seat of my Subaru in the lot behind the vacuum repair shop wearing nitrile gloves and photographed the dashcam from six angles before he touched it. Then he unplugged it, took the card out with a pair of plastic tweezers, sealed it in an evidence bag, and wrote on the bag with a marker while Ruthanne and I watched and Izzy sat on the back steps of the building with his hood up.