I drove north with the truck heater blasting against the cold night air left over from the desert, wearing boots without proper socks because I had dressed in the dark. The road along the orchard was empty. My headlights passed row after row of trees that should have been getting their scheduled moisture, and I found myself glancing at them as if I could see the stress accumulating in their trunks.
At the cottonwoods, the red district notice was gone.
My numbered lock lay in the gravel beside the valve box. Its shackle had been cut clean through. The valve was open again, and water was racing down the hidden branch toward the subdivision lake. In the light of my truck, the fresh metal on the broken shackle shone almost silver against the dust.
There was something different about seeing an unauthorized pipe in daylight and seeing a broken lock in the middle of the night. The pipe could have begun as a contractor's mistake made in reliance on bad paperwork. The cut lock could not. Someone had encountered a closed valve, an official warning, and a physical barrier, then deliberately removed all three obstacles.
I photographed the position of the lock where it lay. I filmed the water running through the branch and spoke the time into the recording. Then I closed the takeoff again. I did not touch the cut shackle, even though I wanted to pick it up and examine the tool marks. I stood beside the valve until the rushing sound eased, and then I called Mara.
"The lock's been cut," I told her.
She was silent for only a beat. "I'm waking the on-call technician. Don't move the lock. We'll come photograph it before the road traffic gets there."
"District notice is gone too."
"We'll document that. And Richard?"
"Yes?"
"Please don't go over to the HOA houses. Not tonight."
I had not planned to, but I understood the warning. I could picture myself knocking on Denise's door at three in the morning, angry enough to say things I could never take back. Whatever satisfaction that would have produced was not worth a confrontation that could distract from the actual evidence. I sat in my truck, called Sam, and told him to check Block Five's emergency system again. Then I waited for Mara in the dark.
She arrived with a technician named Omar Leighton just before three. They marked the valve's position, photographed the disturbed gravel, and documented the torn red notice caught in weeds near the fence. Omar checked the district's map and compared the location against the unauthorized branch he had been told about the previous afternoon. He shook his head slowly.
"Somebody had to come here with a cutter," he said. "That isn't wind damage."
Mara called the county sheriff's dispatch desk while he finished measuring the connection. The dispatcher sent a deputy to take a report concerning possible damage to property and tampering with an unauthorized water connection. By the time Deputy Cole Ramsay arrived, the eastern sky had begun to show a faint gray edge.