"I saw her," Folasade said, after a long time. "On my porch. In May. I came home early from Pilates and she was on my porch with a box in her hands, and she said the sun was on it, she was moving it to the shade." She opened her can and didn't drink from it. "It was cloudy, Leland. It was raining a little. I knew. I knew the way you know when a patient's going to code. And I didn't say anything, because she was Debra. Because I've known her nineteen years. Because Vern."
"I didn't say anything either," I said. "I saw her look at my camera. I sat on it for a week."
"You wrote a Facebook post."
"I wrote a Facebook post."
She laughed, a short, sad sound. "Well," she said. "Look what it did."
They found two hundred and twelve packages in that house. That's the number Detective Solberg told me, in my kitchen, eight days later, when she came by to return my thumb drive and ask a few more questions. Two hundred and twelve, in the spare room and the garage and the walk-in closet of the master bedroom, behind Vern's old shirts, which Debra hadn't been able to give away. Laptops, tablets, phones still in their plastic, game consoles, earbuds, two espresso machines, a robot vacuum, a set of golf clubs, nine pairs of the same expensive running shoes in nine different sizes. A thermal label printer. Rolls of prepaid shipping labels to a freight forwarding address in Linden, New Jersey, the kind of warehouse that takes in boxes from all over the country and repacks them onto pallets and puts the pallets into shipping containers bound for places where nobody is going to call a bank in Utah.
And a spiral notebook. A green one, college ruled. Debra kept a ledger the way she kept everything, in neat blue ballpoint, in columns. Date received. Item. Name on the label. Address on the label. Date shipped. And on the right side, a column that just said "$," and in it, every line, the same figure. Forty dollars.
"Forty dollars a box," Solberg said. "Paid into her checking account from a company that called itself Ridgeline Fulfillment Partners, which is a mailbox in Delaware and a website someone built in an afternoon. Later it was a different name. Then a different one. She was paid by four different companies, which were all the same company, which is to say, nobody. It came out to a little over nine thousand dollars a month at the end. Do you know what Sunhaven costs?"