camera would record everything. But if he raped her on the floor as the stain on the carpet would indicate he did at least once, this camera might miss it. Josh looked over at her and Sarah shook her head.
“What else do you have?” she asked.
“We have stereo speakers with a camera in it. We have fake plants. We even have toasters and wall clocks and, of course, paintings and pictures. If you want to get the entire room, this smoke-alarm camera mounts to the ceiling and will capture everything in the room from an overhead perspective. I don’t know how clear the details will be but it’s at least as clear as those old surveillance cameras they used to put in liquor stores, and they caught criminals with those. It has a ninety-two-degree field of vision and a seven-hundred-foot line of sight. If you mount it over your door you should catch the entire room. It’s wireless and can be hooked up to a wireless VCR to record everything it sees.”
Sarah looked at Josh and they nodded in unison.
“How much?” she asked.
“This one is three hundred and fifty dollars plus another sixty for the VCR.”
“Wow. That’s a little more than we were planning on spending.”
“But it’s perfect,” Josh said. “We’ll take it.”
Sarah couldn’t help but feel a little foolish as they left the store. They had already spent over $2,000 trying to prove she wasn’t crazy and protect her from her phantom rapist. As confident as she was that she was being raped by the neighbor, she had just as many doubts. She couldn’t help but feel a little worried that she might turn on the VCR in the morning and see video of her leaving the bedroom in the middle of the night and then coming back and changing the sheets and scrubbing the walls and floor. She was even more terrified that the video would show her welcoming Dale into her bedroom while she was sleepwalking. If that happened, her marriage was over.
They drove to the hardware store and picked up the security bar and then drove straight home. The detectives were already at the house when they arrived, parked by the driveway in a black Crown Victoria. Their presence made Sarah even more confident. They were starting to take her seriously. They believed her. At least Detective Lassiter did.
Sarah stared hard at the closed blinds across the street. They did not move as she pulled up but she had little doubt that Dale was over there watching. His lawn was beginning to look unkempt, as if he had not mowed it since he moved in. Sarah couldn’t remember ever seeing him outside since the day he moved in.
The detectives met them on the driveway as Sarah and Josh parked their car and began pulling their bags out of the trunk.
“Would you mind if we went in first? We’d like to try to get as many prints as we can and you might smudge them.”
“Sure. We’ll wait outside.”
“You can come into the living room after we’ve dusted the front-door handle and the living room furniture, at least the surfaces that we can get prints from.”
“Don’t you have a team for this? A CSI unit? Like on TV?”
The detectives gave each other one of those looks, the kind people give each other when they’re sharing a secret and weighing the pros and cons of letting someone else in on it.
“We’re sort of doing this unofficially. That rules out the crime-scene unit,” Lassiter said.
“In the movies cops can just call up their buddies in CSU and they’ll do a job for them as a favor. In the real life there’s a shitload of red-tape bureaucratic bullshit involved,” Torres added.
“So, you’re saying this whole case is unofficial?” Josh asked.
“It’s not closed, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s our case and we’re keeping it open.”
“But your superiors aren’t committing any resources to it.”
“No. The lieutenant thinks there’s no crime or that we’d never be able to prove it if there was one because of your police statement. So it’s just the two of us.”
“Well, thanks. Thanks for believing us.”
The detectives started at the front door, examining the handle set with a flashlight. Detective Torres was twirling a brush, fluffing its bristles. He dipped the tip of the brush into a can of black latent-print powder, then lightly dusted the powder onto the door handle. The detective knelt down and gently blew off some of the powder. Then he pressed some clear tape onto the door handle and began smoothing it down with his thumb. He then transferred the tape onto a card and labeled and initialed it.
“I’d better sign it too,” Detective Lassiter said. “Chain of evidence.”
Detective Torres passed the card to his partner while he scribbled in his notebook. He took four more prints from the handle, labeling each one.
“The rest of the prints are too smudged. I think that’s all we’re getting off this.”
“I think that’s good. Most of them are probably from the Lincolns anyway. Let’s go inside.”
The detectives entered the house, leaving Sarah and her husband on the front porch.
“Do you think they’ll find anything?” Sarah asked her husband.
“I don’t know. But remember what they said about getting a print match. If he’s not already in the system, then the only way they can get a copy of his prints will be to arrest him.”
“Do you think they would?”
“You mean arrest him?”
“Yeah, they could probably pick him up for something even if it isn’t for rape. Maybe trespassing or something.”
“I don’t know if they would go that far,” Josh said.
Sarah looked across the street.
“That fucker. If they find his prints in our house I might just kill that bastard myself.”
“If they find his prints in the house they’ll arrest him and that will be the end of it.”
“Not really. I’d have to testify in court. Fuck, that would suck. Do you know what a terrible witness I would make? I don’t even really remember what happened.”
An hour went by before the detectives poked their heads out and told Sarah and her husband that they were okay to come inside.
“Sorry, I almost forgot about you. I’m going to fingerprint both of you while Detective Torres goes upstairs and dusts your bedroom.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Most of the prints are identical, from what I can tell. Those probably belong to you two. But there were some on the slider door handle and the dining room window that didn’t match the others. They may be from a houseguest or a visitor, a friend, the pest-control guy, just about anyone but we’ll run the prints anyway just to be sure.”
It took two more hours before Detective Torres came back downstairs.
“We’ll get back to you if we find anything.”
“Thank you, Detectives,” Sarah said.
Josh walked them to the door and then walked into the living room and collapsed onto the couch.
“Tired?”
Sarah sat in Josh’s lap and wrapped her arms around him.
“Exhausted.” Josh laid his head on her breasts.
“Let’s go upstairs and take a nap. It’s been a long day.”
“Let’s set up the camera first.”
Sarah carried the bags upstairs while Josh removed a stepladder from the downstairs closet. Sarah was already unwrapping the box, sitting on the bed reading the installation instructions when Josh returned.
It took them a moment to figure out how to sync the camera with the VCR but soon they had it installed in the ceiling where the smoke alarm had been.
“Well, let’s just hope there’s not a fire.”
“The other alarms are still working. The house isn’t that big. We’d hear the one in the hallway if there was a fire.”
They stripped down to their underwear and crawled under the covers. Josh turned on the television and they lay in bed together watching
