Ross stopped with his arms still crossed. Then he uncrossed them.
The detective I had spoken to that morning was named Laura Pena. She worked special victims for the county. She listened to everything, looked at the photos I had taken of the camera from my own yard, and wrote down the names of the four people I knew had been at that barbecue.
She told me something I will never forget. She said, you did exactly the right thing by calling us instead of going over there yourself. Let us handle it.
So when Ross said it was his property and he could point it wherever he wanted, I just repeated what she told me. The law does not care where the camera sits. It cares what it records.
A whole year of being the paranoid guy with something to hide, when all I was ever trying to hide was my own kid.
Ross went inside and closed his door.
Detective Pena came with a warrant two days later. They took the camera, the computer it was connected to, and two hard drives. I did not watch. My wife took our daughter to her sister that afternoon. We did not want her anywhere near it.
It took the county about three weeks. I will not go into what they found. I will just say Ross was charged, and the judge issued a protective order that same week. He cannot come within five hundred feet of our home or our daughter. He moved out of the house a month later.
Two of the neighbors who had been at that barbecue gave statements. One of them, a retired firefighter named Walt, came to our door afterward. He said he had felt sick since the day Ross showed those clips. He said he should have called someone that same night. He said he was sorry.
I told him he called when it counted.
The hardest part was talking to our daughter. She is fifteen. We did not tell her everything. But we told her enough. We told her she had done nothing wrong, that the adults handled it, and that she was safe. We found her a counselor she likes. She says it helps.
The house next door sold in the spring to a young couple with a baby. The first week they moved in, the husband came over and introduced himself. He said he had heard what happened from the realtor. He said if we ever saw anything on their property that made us uncomfortable, we should tell him right away.
That summer, the whole street got together on a Saturday. Walt brought a truck full of arborvitae from the nursery. Six families planted a hedge along our side yard, eight feet tall by the fall.
My daughter took the extra curtain down in October.
She opens her blinds every morning now. The sun comes right in.