…”the landlord. He’s a sheriff’s deputy. That’s how he gets the cameras.”
I sat on my kitchen floor with a smoke detector in my lap and understood, for the first time, why the woman who lived here before me had been too afraid to call the police.
I didn’t call the number on the lease. I didn’t call 911 either, because I didn’t know who would answer. Instead, I did what the next line of the letter told me to do. There was a name written at the very bottom, in the same tiny handwriting. A detective with the state police, not the county. “She believes me,” it said.
I called her from a coffee shop across town. Her name was Detective Alvarez. When I said “Rachel Torres,” she went quiet. Then she asked me not to go home that night, and to bring the camera and the letter to her office in the morning.
Rachel had come to her six months earlier, she told me. She’d found a camera in her bathroom vent. She’d reported it to the county sheriff’s office, and nothing happened, except that a week later, her landlord, Deputy Harlan, raised her rent and started “inspecting” the apartment. She broke her lease and moved out. She’d been leaving letters for whoever moved in next, hoping someone would find them before they found the camera.
The serial number on my smoke detector was the piece Detective Alvarez had been missing. It traced back to a batch of surveillance equipment purchased by the county sheriff’s office, three years ago, and signed out to one deputy.
The state police searched Harlan’s other rental properties the following month. They found cameras in four of them.
He was arrested and charged with unlawful surveillance and misuse of government property. He no longer works for the sheriff’s office. A few weeks later, Detective Alvarez called and said someone wanted to talk to me.
It was Rachel. We met at a diner halfway between our towns. She was about my age, with short hair and a nervous laugh. She brought me a coffee mug that said “Not at this address,” which made us both laugh harder than it should have.
“Thank you for opening my mail,” she said. “Nobody ever had before.”
We text all the time now. When I moved out, I left a letter of my own for the next tenant, taped inside the front door. It just says: “This apartment is safe now. Somebody made sure.”
