She nodded once. "There's a room up there," she said. "Spare bedroom, across from the bathroom. Door was standing wide open. I didn't touch anything. I didn't have to." She took a breath. "It's floor to ceiling, Mr. Dupuis. Boxes. Electronics, mostly. A label printer and a folding table and a roll of tape. And on the table, right on top, there's a black laptop box with a shipping label on it with your name and your address."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't.
"And next to it," she said, "is a list. Printed. Names and addresses. Looks like it's most of this street and a lot of the next one. Some of them have check marks."
Behind her, Debra had come out onto her front step. She was holding her phone with both hands. She was looking at me, and for the first time all summer there was nothing composed in her face at all. Her mouth was moving. I couldn't hear what she was saying, and then I could.
"It's four o'clock," she was saying. "It's almost four o'clock. I have to go. They'll be expecting me. He gets upset if I'm late. He gets so upset."
They let her make the call. I want that on the record, because a lot of people in Tamarack Ridge have said a lot of things since, and some of them have said the police were rough with her, and they were not. Hendricks stood with her on the front step while she called Sunhaven and told whoever answered that she was going to be late, that something had come up, that could someone please sit with Vern at dinner and tell him she was coming. Her voice did not shake on that call at all. It was the steadiest I had ever heard her. Then she hung up, and handed the phone to Hendricks without being asked, and sat down on her own front step with her knees together and her hands in her lap and looked out at the cul-de-sac like she was waiting for a bus.
What happened after that took the rest of the day and most of the night, and I only saw pieces of it. A detective came out from the station around six, a tall woman in a linen blazer with a lanyard around her neck, who introduced herself to me as Detective Annika Solberg, Financial Crimes, and shook my hand like she meant it. She spent twenty minutes in my basement with the recorder and my thumb drive and asked better questions than I'd thought to ask myself. At what time did the van come, every time. Which porches could the driveway camera see. Whether I'd ever seen Debra carry anything into her house that hadn't been delivered to her house. I said I hadn't looked. She said, "You will," and gave me her card.
Around nine, a judge signed a search warrant. I know because a second detective arrived with it in a folder and they went into the Pelletiers' house in gloves, and the lights stayed on in every window until almost two in the morning. Debra had been taken to the station by then, in the back of Aranda's car, not in handcuffs. Folasade came across the cul-de-sac at about ten-thirty with two cans of sparkling water and stood in my driveway next to me, watching people in gloves carry boxes out of the Pelletiers' garage and photograph them on a folding table under a portable light.