"I've pulled a lot of grows," she said. "I grew up in Nampa. I've never seen one with flowers like that."
"Cannabis doesn't have flowers like that," I said. "Cannabis flowers are those sticky green clusters. These are hibiscus. Smell one."
She didn't smell one. She did pull a lower leaf and bag it, and she ran a field test on another leaf right there on my patio table. It was a little plastic pouch with glass ampoules inside that you crack and shake. I watched the liquid stay clear and then go faintly pale, which I gathered was not the right colour for marijuana. She looked at it for a long moment and wrote something in her notebook.
"Negative," she said.
Then she walked back out front and tested a pinch from the black bag in a fresh pouch, on the hood of her cruiser, in full view of Darlene and the leaf-blower man and the woman with the dog. That pouch turned a deep purple almost instantly.
"Positive," she said, to no one in particular.
"Well, of course it's positive!" Darlene said. "She keeps the real ones somewhere else and grows the decoys. They make strains now that don't test."
Officer Kowalczyk looked at her for a long moment. "That's not really how it works, ma'am."
"I have video," Darlene said. "Of her. Going to the mailbox. In the middle of the night." She was already holding out her phone.
Officer Kowalczyk watched the clip on Darlene's phone, and I watched her watching it, and then she called me down the walk to look. On the screen was the view from the camera on Darlene's deck: my backyard, rendered in the flat grey of night vision, and the side of my house, and a slice of my front yard past the corner of the garage. At 10:14 the night before, according to the timestamp, a figure walked across that slice of front yard, carrying something, to the mailbox. The figure opened the mailbox, put something in, raised the little red flag, and walked back.
The figure was me.
"See?" Darlene said. "Right to the mailbox. Right where I found it."