The third camera was the one Daniel had almost forgotten about.
He had installed it two summers earlier, after a string of small thefts in the neighborhood — a missing garden hose, a wheelbarrow that vanished and reappeared three streets over, a neighbor's catalytic converter gone in the night. The camera sat tucked behind the garage, aimed low across the back of the yard, mostly to catch anyone coming over the rear fence. It was not part of his security system in any organized sense. He had bought it online, mounted it himself, and checked the feed maybe twice.
When he told the officers about it, Officer Hale had raised an eyebrow.
"You've got three cameras?"
"Three," Daniel said. "This one's the shy one."
They pulled the footage on the garage computer while Ruiz stood behind them with her notebook open. The timestamp on the hidden camera started at 7:14, the lens grainy and angled oddly, catching the yard in a skewed trapezoid: the raised beds at the left edge, the water tank looming at the top of the frame, and — dead center — his green folding chair.
At 7:19, Helen Marsh entered the frame from the right, carrying something wrapped in a gray cloth. The bundle looked heavy enough to make her list slightly to one side. She set it down behind the tank frame and unwrapped it with the careful deliberateness of someone who had practiced the motion at home. The object inside was dark and metal. Daniel could not identify it — the resolution was poor — but from the way she used it, bracing one end against the frame and leaning her weight into it, it was some kind of pry bar or heavy wrench.
She worked on the support for several minutes. The camera had no audio, but Daniel could see the rhythm of it: brace, lean, pause, check the connection point, move to the next one. She worked methodically, top to bottom, the way a mechanic would. At one point she stepped back and studied the frame the way a person studies a door they have just unlocked.
Then she did the thing that made Daniel's stomach drop.
She walked to his chair. The green folding chair he had placed by the beds at 3:55 that afternoon, angled toward the tomato rows, still holding the faint crease of his weight in the fabric. She looked at it for a long moment. Then she bent down, gripped both armrests, and moved it — four or five inches, no more — and set it down again. She stepped back, checked the angle against the tank's silhouette, and adjusted it once more, a fraction to the left.
Centered. Deliberately, precisely centered under the tank's fall path.
Officer Hale stopped the playback.
"She moved your chair," he said quietly.
"Play it back," Ruiz said. "The last thirty seconds."
They watched again. The careful repositioning. The step back. The second adjustment. It was not a stumble or an accident. Nobody moves a stranger's lawn chair in four-inch increments by accident.
Then came the part that changed everything.
At 7:24, Helen pulled a phone from her cardigan pocket and held it to her ear. The hidden camera had no microphone, but the yard camera — the one from Chapter 9's footage — did, and Ruiz had already synced the audio track. They played it.
Helen's voice, thin and clear through the yard microphone, carried across the garden:
"No, he sits here. Every afternoon."
A pause.
"Tomorrow won't matter if he can't show up."
Daniel heard himself make a sound he did not recognize. Megan, who had come downstairs when the officers arrived and now stood in the garage doorway, put her hand over her mouth.
"That's it?" Hale asked.
"That's the whole call," Ruiz said. "Fourteen seconds. The number was unlisted at the time — we pulled it from the carrier an hour ago. It went to her son's cell."
Daniel stared at the frozen frame on the monitor. Helen Marsh at 7:24 in the morning, standing in his yard, holding her phone, having just moved his chair into the path of eight hundred kilograms of water and steel.
"She wanted me under it," he said.
Nobody answered. There was nothing useful to say.
Hale bagged the garage computer's hard drive and labeled it with the date. Ruiz stood at the garage door looking out at the yard, at the scarred patch of earth where the tank had stood.
"She couldn't time it," Ruiz said. "She loosened that frame and hoped."
Daniel thought about the twelve minutes — the phone call from his sister, the bookshelf, the ordinary errand that had kept him inside while the frame gave way. He thought about his coffee mug under the wreckage, and his gloves, and the crease in the green fabric where his weight had been every afternoon at four.
"Luck," he said quietly. "That's all it was."