Fidel knelt down at the edge and looked at it for a while without saying anything. Then he got up and followed the line of the blue pipe with his eyes, across the grass, past the bench with the bronze plaque, past the red maple, to a green plastic valve box set flush in the bluegrass about thirty feet away, the kind of box you'd never notice unless you were looking for it. He walked over to it and lifted the lid and shone his flashlight in.
He was quiet so long that Kasprzak followed him over, and then I did, and then, after a moment, so did Octave, and so did Pia, holding her towel.
Inside the valve box was an irrigation manifold, three electric zone valves in a row on a brass header, with thin colored wires running off to a controller somewhere. The blue pipe from my trench fed into the header from one side. And clamped into the line just before the header, upright, was a black plastic canister about the size of a coffee can, with a screw-top lid and two small tubes running in and out of it. On the side of the canister there was a faded sticker with a picture of a flower on it, and the words AUTOMATIC FERTILIZER INJECTOR, and below that, in smaller red letters, a warning I couldn't read from where I stood.
"Okay," Fidel said, very quietly, to himself. Then he turned around and said it again, louder, to Kasprzak. "Okay. Officer, I need to explain to you what this is."
He did it standing there on the bluegrass, with the bench and the tree behind him. I don't think I've ever heard anybody explain anything more clearly, before or since. He said that the black pipe in the trench was the homeowner's private service line, carrying water that had already passed through the district's meter and been billed to the homeowner. He said that the brass saddle was a tap, a hot tap, the kind you could put on a live line if you knew what you were doing, and that whoever had put it there had known exactly what they were doing, because it was a clean job. He said the blue pipe was carrying the homeowner's water, the water I was paying for, under the fence and into the association's irrigation system for the Gateway Green. He said that the Gateway Green had its own district irrigation meter, over by the monument, and that the district had put that meter under a drought allocation two summers ago, and that he remembered, because he had personally installed the flow restrictor on it after the association blew through its allocation three months running.
"And every summer since then," he said, "that meter's read about a third of what it used to. The district gave the association a WaterWise Community certificate for it last spring. I think it's hanging in the clubhouse."
Nobody said anything.