You’re wasting the taxpayers’ time, Claudia.”

I didn’t break stride. I signaled the lead cyber technician to bag the mobile devices on her desk.

“I’m not looking for your local hard drives, Priscilla.” My voice was steady and final. “I’m looking for the network activity logs from the home router.”

The smugness vanished, replaced by the look of a cornered animal. She understood — far too late — that data packets moving through a modern home router get backed up to encrypted cloud servers, entirely independent of the camera hardware she thought she’d disabled.

The timestamps, the IP addresses, the metadata of their access: my team was already pulling all of it.

The raid was systematic. Officers tagged computers, laptops, and phones and dropped them into Faraday shielded bags to block any remote wipe signal.