I don’t answer her. Not yet. The tech pries at the strap with a proprietary screwdriver and clicks the transmitter out of its cradle. I feel the absence, a cool ring where the monitor has been sitting for two weeks.
“We shouldn’t be asking my client to speak while you’re still diagnosing a device failure,” Roberto cuts in. “But since you asked—home. He was home. All night. I can give you three flavors of proof by lunch.”
“What flavors?” Elena says.
“Guests,” Roberto says. “Security video. Gate logs. Staff. Take your pick.”
“All of them,” she says.
“After we confirm whether your equipment tripped over its own shoelaces,” he shoots back.
The tech speaks up again. “Device shows healthy battery, normal strap tension. No cut alert,” he narrates, half for me, half for the room. “Confirmed. No tamper flag. Overnight signal quality… hm. Spiky.”
“‘Hm,’” Roberto says, dry as dust. “Very reassuring.”
I let him do the outrage thing. It fits him so well.
Elena flips a tab and sets a one-page order flat on the table with a finger on the relevant line. “Condition Ten,” she recites, not reading because she doesn’t need to. “Do not leave the city without prior permission of the Court. We enforce plain language. If the system says you left, we examine and preserve.”
Roberto leans in, smooth as silk. “And when the system says ‘just kidding,’ we write that down too.”
“We do,” she says. “Along with what we did to make sure it doesn’t say ‘just kidding’ again. I’ll need your flavors of proof anyway. If I have to explain this to a judge in a week, I am not standing there empty-handed with ‘spiky’ as the reason.”
Roberto’s mouth twitched. Though I’ve been away for eleven years, I can read Roberto’s expressions just as well as I ever could.
He can’t help but like the young prosecutor as well. He won’t admit it, but he’s enjoying verbally sparring with her.
“All on a drive,” Roberto says, tapping his case. “Exported by the vendor.”
“I don’t want a curated highlight reel,” Elena says, putting her hand out.
“Raw footage.” Roberto puts the drive in her hand. “Door cams, stair landing, lot entrance. All time-stamped. A chain-of-custody letter from the vendor. Happy?”
“Take a lot more than that to make me happy.” She looks up at the tech. “Any chance this is mapping drift?”
The tech shakes his head, finally meeting her eyes. He’s steadier when he gets to explain. “If I had multipath or a tower handoff, I’d expect to see elevated error and a sloppy breadcrumb. I don’t. The breadcrumb is clean—the point hops the boundary and returns. Strap says it didn’t move. GPS says it did. Without a cut or a tamper flag, the system assumes GPS.”
Roberto snorts. “So the system sides with the sky over the strap. Wonderful.”
“It’s how it’s designed,” the tech says.
“Yeah, designed by you people. Who’s to say someone here isn’t messing with it on purpose?” Roberto accuses.
Elena ignores him. “Mr. Conti,” she says, eyes back on me. “Were you at home between oh-one-hundred and oh-two-hundred?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Anyone see you at oh-one-twenty-two?”
“We had guests until well past that time,” Roberto answers. “All will confirm that my client was inside his home, well within city boundaries, at the time of thisfalseevent.”
“I’m going to run a strap tension self-test,” the tech says. “If the strap was too loose, the accelerometer might miss low movement, and GPS dominates. He could have crossed a line on a porch and—”
Elena cuts that off with a small shake of her head. “He lives well inside the line.”
“Correct,” Roberto says. “The edge of his land is still within the city by a healthy margin. The only way he left the city in twenty-one seconds is if he sprouted wings.”
The tech lifts his hands. “I’m just telling you what the machine is reporting.”
