“Claudia, look at this. The home network has an active hidden link to a Nest unit.” She tapped the glass. “It was on the living room bookshelf, disguised as a decorative picture frame.

It never showed up in the standard room sweep because it’s a stand-alone, battery-operated wireless unit.”

The oversight was massive. They had focused on wiping the local CCTV drives and completely ignored a cloud-synced peripheral dressed up as home decor.

Running on factory default settings, the camera had been silently pushing encrypted video to the manufacturer’s servers every time it detected motion.

“It’s set to auto-backup,” Chandra said, eyes wide. “They didn’t know it was operational. The system just finished the handshake to download a file uploaded the night of the incident.”

She clicked. A progress bar crawled across the central monitor.