“It wasn’t hanging until two minutes ago.”
She went still. For two beats, the only sound was the drone of an air-conditioning compressor kicking on over at number twelve, rattling its fan against an unlevel pad. Frank didn’t let go of the lead. He worked his left hand down the casing, his thumb finding the smooth curve of the faceplate to steady it.
The tiny ring around the lens didn’t flicker. It sat there, a pinhole of steady, dull amber, warm to the touch from the afternoon heat.
Karen’s chin raised a fraction of an inch. “Let go of the wire, Frank.”
“You first.”
She released the bracket, but she didn’t step down to the walkway. Instead, her hand drifted down toward her hip, fingers brushing the flap of her canvas bag as if checking the weight of whatever was nested inside. Frank turned the unit over in his palm, angling the backplate up toward the sun to check if the screw tabs were sheared clean off.
The plastic was scarred near the base, but it wasn’t from his siding.
Across the black resin backing, just below the factory barcode, someone had scored a three-digit series into the casing with a hot needle, then sealed the gouge with a smear of clear silicone that was still tacky enough to take the print of his thumb.
Karen leaned forward, the dark glasses slipping an eighth of an inch down the bridge of her nose. Her voice lost its sharp edge, dropping into something tight, flat, and entirely too low.
“Where did you buy that unit, Frank?”
CHAPTER 2
“Where did you buy that unit, Frank?”
The question didn’t hang in the air; it fell like lead into the porch dust. Her tone had lost the nasal, sing-song cadence of the civic committee. It had flattened out completely, the vowels clipped short and dry, like someone reading serial numbers off an invoice.
Frank didn’t shift his stance. His thumb remained anchored against the warm resin, feeling the faint, gummy give of the fresh sealant beneath the barcode. “Hardware store over on Ninth. Same place I bought the deck stain. Same place I bought the lag bolts holding up the gutter you complained about in June.”