So he pulled alongside his mailbox on the street and cut the engine. His phone buzzed in the passenger seat. Exterior 1 had alerted his own arrival. He opened the app and shut down the whole system. The cameras wouldn’t take any more pictures or send any more messages.

With the exception of the angle of Roy’s truck and its dangling door, nothing looked amiss unless anyone peered into the shade of the portico.

The stoop, under its peaked roof, was flanked by a twin set of bushy evergreen shrubs. Their height and their glossy dark leaves kept it dim enough to grow moss where the concrete met the damp earth. It was getting on toward dark. The deepening twilight siphoned off more detail from the front of the house by the minute. But because he knew more or less what to look for, Jonathan spied the flaw straightaway. The pane of the left sidelight panel was raggedly darker than the one to the right of the door.

The east-side camera had shown Roy bending down right where the runoff slope next to the house was lined with river rocks. In his second appearance at the front-door camera, Roy had been back from the side of the house with a gray-brown something in his hand about the smashing size of a softball.

Jonathan got out of his car and walked to the mailbox. He opened it, then closed it back again, ignoring the sizable stack of envelopes and advertising flyers inside. What he’d really wanted was an excuse to look up and down the street. He’d gotten that, which was good. Better yet, there’d been no one to see.

No lights seemed to be on in the house, but it would have been much brighter almost an hour earlier when Roy had broken the window and let himself in. The motion lights, both outside and inside, didn’t activate until dark. But John had shut down all the automation with the cameras. Dark was better right now.

He walked down the driveway, threading between Roy’s truck and Donna’s car. The dome light was still on inside the truck, giving him hope for the battery and for Roy’s ability to get right back on the road as soon as possible, with his tail between his legs or ripped right off if it came to that.

Jonathan sized up the piles of junk in the truck’s front seats. The jumble was incomprehensible, but the cup holders and center console were tightly packed to overflowing with three open energy drink cans and a handful of mini liquor bottles, their caps scattered over the seat and in the footwell. He pushed the door closed and bumped it latched with his hip to keep it quiet. The light went out.

Jonathan took his keys from his pocket as he strode up the front walk in a pantomime of a normal evening.