While Ruth booked Travis into her patrol car, Dana opened the laptop she'd taken from his truck. Most of the folders asked for passwords. One was already open.
The directory was called ACTIVE PROPERTIES.
Inside were eighteen video feeds, arranged in a grid. They filled the screen like a security office wall.
Some showed driveways. Some showed back doors. Others showed the insides of rooms β living rooms, kitchens, hallways. People moved through a few of them. A woman carried laundry across a frame. A man sat at a kitchen table reading.
I found my own kitchen on the second row. The angle came from above the refrigerator β from the hallway camera Carla had installed. Someone had been watching my kitchen for two years.
Then I saw the next feed. Mia's bedroom door. The camera faced it from the hallway, slightly above eye level.
Two green labels sat beneath that feed.
The first read: HOUSE EMPTY AFTER 9:30 P.M.
The second read: NIGHT SHIFT WORKER.
Both were accurate. I worked the overnight shift twice a week. On those nights Mia was home alone after nine-thirty.
My hands started shaking. I put them in my pockets so nobody would see.
"Daniel," Ruth said quietly. She'd come to stand beside me. "Look away if you need to."
I didn't look away. I needed to see how long this had been going on. I needed to see what they'd seen.
One feed showed a child's bedroom with the door half open. Another showed an elderly woman asleep in a recliner. The timestamps in the corners were live. These weren't recordings. These were happening right now, in houses all over Cedar Falls, while their owners made coffee and folded laundry and had no idea.
Dana clicked another folder. Payment records. A private security company called Sentinel Home Group had been purchasing detailed household information from SunHarvest for nearly four years. Addresses. Schedules. Device inventories. Wi-Fi maps.
"The company was supposed to use the data to design neighborhood security systems," Dana said. "Instead, someone inside Sentinel sold schedules and access codes to burglary crews."
She showed me a transfer log. Payments from Sentinel to SunHarvest, monthly, labeled as consulting fees. Then payments from accounts she hadn't identified yet, going outward.
"Travis knew," I said.
Dana didn't answer directly. She called over one of the backup officers and told him to photograph every screen before the battery died.
Travis sat in the patrol car with the door open. Ruth had left it open so he could hear. I walked over.
"You watched my daughter's bedroom door," I said. "You watched my kitchen. You knew my shift schedule."
He stared at the dashboard.
"Say something."
"You don't understand," he said. "I only installed equipment. I didn't know how the information was used."
"The controller had my daughter's door labeled with her schedule. The cards had our addresses. You delivered a camera programmed with a sixteen-year-old's address. And your own messages prove you reset alarms after burglaries."
"I installed what they gave me."
"Who gave it to you?"
He looked at me for the first time. "You should ask what Sentinel does with a house that's empty after nine-thirty."
"I'm asking you."
"I don't know."
Ruth closed the patrol car door. Through the glass, Travis's mouth kept moving like he was still arguing with someone.
Dana called me back to the laptop. She'd found a message thread between Travis and an unnamed account.
The first message read: Property clear. Restore alarm after 4:30.
Travis had answered: I'll be there at seven. Tell them not to damage panel six.
"That's from the night of one of the burglaries," Dana said. "He knew. He coordinated the alarm reset."
I thought about the couple from the neighborhood emails. They'd been told their alarm glitched. They'd believed it. They'd probably upgraded their system afterward β maybe with SunHarvest.
Grace was watching me. She'd been uncuffed at some point β Ruth had taken them off while the firefighters worked. She sat on the curb with the cuffs in her lap, and her eyes were wet.
"I told you the network prepared," she said. "I'm sorry it took paint to make anyone look."
Before I could answer, Sophie came running from Grace's house. She was holding an old tablet, and her face was white.
"The link is back," she said.
Dana took the tablet. The private feed had become active again.
But it wasn't showing Sophie's bedroom anymore.
It was showing all of us, standing in my driveway.
The angle came from somewhere above my garage.