Vera was arrested that same afternoon.
I wasn't there to see it. Doyle called me an hour later and told me it had been quiet β two officers, no scene, Vera walking out of her house in the same green HOA jacket she'd worn at a hundred meetings, carrying nothing. She didn't argue. She didn't cry. She asked if she could lock the front door, and they let her.
Owen was arrested at the coworking office downtown. The police found a microphone on his desk, a laptop running my voice model, and a notebook full of notes from the hearing β timing cues, likely questions, the address answer written out in his own handwriting. Avenue. He had copied the forged form so carefully that he never stopped to ask whether the street on the paper was the street in real life.
Frank was detained at the airport. He had a one-way ticket and a carry-on bag, and according to Doyle, he looked relieved when they stopped him β the way people look when a decision they couldn't make gets made for them.
The three of them were processed separately, and from that point their stories diverged. Frank moved first. He pleaded guilty before the trial, and his attorney put forward the story that Frank had been told the devices were for emergency continuity and HOA security testing. He claimed his sister had assured him everything was legitimate.
The messages told a different story. Doyle's team recovered payment records showing Vera had paid Frank separately for each targeted address β not a contractor's flat fee, but a per-house price. You don't pay per address for emergency continuity. You pay per address for targets.
Owen pleaded guilty too. His statement was the one that stayed with me longest. He described practicing my voice in his car during his commute, playing recordings of my calls and repeating my phrases until the rhythm felt natural. He said the short verification calls came first β just "yes," "no," "that is correct" β because those were the easiest to get right. Later, when Vera introduced the voice software, he could let the model carry the longer answers while he handled the timing.
"The nine o'clock hearing was supposed to be the final performance," he told the investigators. "I was supposed to keep the camera off and blame service trouble. If they made me appear, I had the video ready."
He also described the moment it fell apart. When I joined from the truck, Vera's instruction came through: challenge him. So he challenged me. And when the judge asked for the street name, he gave the answer on the script without thinking, the way an actor delivers a line he's rehearsed too many times to question.
"After that," he said, "there was nothing to say."
Frank and Owen both received reduced but substantial sentences for their cooperation. I didn't attend their hearings. Samuel sent me the summaries, and I read them at the kitchen table and felt nothing in particular β not satisfaction, not anger. They were small men who had done a large wrong for someone else's plan, and the system would deal with them in its own slow way.
Vera was different. She refused every offer. She hired a trial attorney with a reputation for making prosecutors work, and she made it clear she intended to fight. I understood why. A guilty plea would have meant admitting what she did. A trial gave her one more stage, one more chance to tell a story where she was the reasonable person and everyone else had misunderstood.
The trial was set for the following year. Samuel told me to prepare for a long process β motions, delays, the slow machinery of a case with this much technical evidence. I told him I had time. The studio was safe. The easement was void. I could wait.
That winter, I spent a lot of time in the studio myself. Not painting β I had never been the artist in the family. Just sitting at Helen's table, looking at her final drawing of the girl with the lantern, thinking about how close we had come to losing all of it. Mia was right about one thing: they had almost taken it because a computer said I agreed. The thought never quite stopped chilling me.
In the spring, the prosecutor's office called. They wanted me to review my testimony. The trial was coming, and they needed me ready. I said I was ready. I had been ready since the morning I watched Vera kneel at my utility box with a pair of red cutters in her hands.