By the sixth morning of glass in my pool, I stopped pretending a notebook and a pool net were going to solve anything. That afternoon I drove two towns over and paid cash for a pair of weatherproof trail cameras and a doorbell camera I had no intention of mounting on any doorbell.
Dana Mitchell met me in a parking lot behind a strip mall, the way people meet when they don't want to be seen meeting. She looked at the bag through my car window and said, "Tell me where."
"Backyard," I said. "Covering the gate, the pool, and the fence line on the Cole side."
"Not inside the house," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Not inside. Not the street. My fence, my gate, my pool."
She nodded. "Documenting your own property because you believe someone is trespassing to damage it — that's your right. Don't put one on her fence, don't aim at her windows, and don't tell anyone except me."
"I wasn't planning to tell anyone."
"Good," she said. "We'll have our own eyes on the place. You don't need to know where. And Daniel — don't go out there to meet her. If she comes, the cameras see her, you stay inside, and you call me."
I agreed, and I meant it.
That evening Tom Bradley came over with a drill and a level, and we pretended he was helping me hang a shelf. Tom had spent his career designing industrial control systems, and he understood sight lines the way I understood ledgers. He stood in the middle of my yard, hands on his hips, and pointed at the corner near the oleander.
"Blind spot," he said. "Anything comes along the fence from the Cole side, your patio camera catches the top of a head and nothing else. Move the fence one three feet west and you get the full approach."
I moved it. The cameras blinked their small red eyes at me in the dark, and for the first time in weeks I felt like I'd done something that might matter.
The glass kept coming. Tuesday: a scatter near the steps. Wednesday: nothing, which frightened me more than the glass had. Thursday: a cluster by the skimmer that glittered under the pool light. I photographed each find with the date and a ruler in the frame and sent the photos to Dana's number, and never asked what happened to them after.
On Friday my phone buzzed at eleven. "Tonight," Dana said. "Our people will be in position after dark. You stay inside after nine. Curtains drawn. If you hear anything, you do not investigate. You call me."
"Will I know they're there?"
"No," she said. "That's the point."
I spent the evening doing ordinary things. I made pasta. I called Emma and listened to her describe a playground kickball dispute in exhaustive detail. I told her the pool would be clean and safe by summer, and heard the lightness in my own voice making a promise I wasn't sure I could keep.
At nine I drew the curtains. At ten I sat in the dark living room and watched the green glow of the camera base station and tried not to think about who else was out there in the dark, watching my backyard for me.
Nothing happened that night. Empty yard, undisturbed cover, a gate that never moved. I checked the footage at five in the morning frame by frame and found nothing, and felt an absurd disappointment, as if the absence of a crime were a personal failure.
Dana called at seven. "Quiet nights happen. She's careful. She'll wait until she thinks you've relaxed."
"I haven't relaxed in a month."
"Then she'll wait until she thinks you have," Dana said. "Keep the routine. Same lights, same cover, same everything. Predictability is what makes the trap work."
So I kept the routine. On the second night, at 2:14 a.m., the fence camera caught a shadow moving along the jasmine vine — four seconds of dark against dark, nothing a jury would ever see. I sent the clip to Dana with shaking hands.
"Could be a cat," she said, ten minutes later.
"It wasn't a cat."
"I know," she said. "But 'could be a cat' is what a defense attorney says. We need more than a shadow."
On the third night, the gate camera caught the lock.
I saw it at 5:40 in the morning, coffee going cold in my hand. At 1:47 a.m., a figure in dark clothes and a hood approached my side gate along the fence line and knelt. There was a glint — metal on metal, brief and bright. The gate swung inward on the hinges I'd oiled myself the previous spring. The figure slipped through and out of frame, the gate swung shut, and my lock hung open and useless.
I called Dana before I finished watching. "Don't touch anything," she said. "Don't go out there. I'm sending someone."
I stood at my kitchen window and watched dawn come up over the pool, thinking about someone standing in my yard at 1:47 in the morning, thirty feet from where I slept, and I hadn't heard a thing.
The trap was working. That was the thought I held onto. The trap was working, and the only thing it required of me was the hardest thing I'd ever been asked to do: nothing. Stay inside. Keep the routine. Let her come.
The shadow on the vine, the cut lock — these were rehearsals. The main event was still ahead. I had never been good at waiting. Forensic accounting had taught me one kind of patience — following a number through six shell companies — but this was a different animal. This was waiting for someone to walk onto your own ground and do the thing you'd been dreading, so the law could finally see it too.
I put the cover on the pool that evening, the way I always did. I drew the curtains. I sat in the dark.
And I waited.