What came after did not happen all at once, and some of it did not happen the way any of them would have chosen.
On Thursday, the day after she came home, Celestina Saldivar went in to Arnot Hills Rehabilitation and Nursing Center before her shift and sat down with the director of nursing and told her what had happened, all of it, including Deb's name, and including the fact that she still had the second pill in a baggie in her purse, which she handed over. The director called the police. The pill went to the county lab and came back as pressed fentanyl with a trace of xylazine. Deb's husband, it turned out, had been buying what he believed were Percocet from a man in the parking lot of a bar on Clemens Center Parkway for most of a year, because his own prescription had been cut off when his doctor retired, and he had been rationing them carefully, and he had gotten lucky, every time, for a year. When the detectives came to his house he cried at the kitchen table and gave them the man's number. Three weeks later there was an arrest, and two other pressing operations in Chemung and Steuben counties were connected to the same supplier. None of that made the news in any way that mentioned a nursing assistant with a broken tooth.
Deb was suspended. So was Celestina, pending a review of her nursing assistant registration by the state. Deb did not speak to her. In the break room, Celestina heard later from somebody else, Deb had said that she'd only been trying to help, and that this was what you got for helping. Celestina did not argue with that when she heard it. She said, "She's not wrong. That's what she got. I'm sorry it's what she got." And then she said, "But it was going to be somebody, and next time it might have been Mrs. Bellweather," and she went to her outpatient appointment.
The tooth came out on Friday at the community health center. The dentist who owed Arliss Duchene a favor turned out to be a cheerful heavyset woman with a nose ring who apologized for not being able to save it and gave Celestina a prescription for ibuprofen and a printed sheet of instructions and told her, kindly, at the door, that next time it hurt like that she should come straight in and say Arliss sent her and they would find a slot, and that nobody should ever have to wait four months with an abscess, and that she was sorry the system was the way it was.
On the following Monday, Celestina went to the Elmira Police Department on East Church Street with Emi at school and Mrs. Vuong waiting on a bench in the lobby, and asked to make a statement about an incident from six and a half years earlier. It took most of the morning to find somebody who could take it. In the end it was Officer Ostrowe who did, in a small room with a table bolted to the floor, and it was Officer Ostrowe who came out afterward and told Mrs. Vuong, quietly, that there was nothing much the department could legally do with it now, the case was long closed, the charge long dropped. But it would go into the file. It would be there. If anybody ever pulled Lazaro Prewitt's name again, it would be there.
"And the newspaper?" said Mrs. Vuong.
"I'm not the newspaper, ma'am."
"No," Mrs. Vuong agreed. "But I know a woman who is."
Whether that ever came to anything, Lazaro did not know, and he did not ask. He had found that he did not much want it in the paper. He did not want his name in the paper at all, for any reason. He wanted, it turned out, something smaller and harder to get.
The sergeant came by the alley on a Wednesday afternoon, a thick-necked man in his fifties named Kolb, out of uniform, in a Bills jacket. He stood at the mouth of the alley for a minute with his hands in his pockets and looked at the coffee can. Then he walked down and looked at Lazaro, who was sitting on the milk crate with the reassembled carburetor in his lap.