The detective was Ray Lattimore. We met him on Tuesday at the Kestrel Creek police station, a low brick building between the post office and a car wash, in a small interview room with a table, four chairs, and a box of tissues that had seen hard service. Lattimore was big, quiet, and grey at the temples, with reading glasses on a cord and a paper cup of sunflower seeds he worked through methodically, cracking each one between his front teeth and dropping the shells into a second cup. He watched Gus's footage on his own laptop twice, without speaking, and then once more, slowly, frame by frame. He paused it on the clear shot of Darlene's face.
"Mr. Teague," he said. "How long has that camera been in that hedge?"
"Since April 19th," Gus said. "When the vixen moved in. I've got every file it's ever taken, if you want them. There's a raccoon that comes through in July that I think has a drinking problem."
Lattimore smiled for the first time. "I'll take the September files. All of them. And the camera itself, if you can spare it for a week, so we can check the clock against something." He turned to me. "Ms. Pruitt, I'm going to tell you some things, and your lawyer is going to tell you whether you can respond."
"She can listen," Bev said.
"When Officer Kowalczyk brought this case in on Saturday," Lattimore said, "I'll be honest, it had a smell. Not the bag. The case. We get a lot of neighbor calls, and most of them are what they look like. But I've been doing this for nineteen years, and when the person reporting the drugs has also filed four HOA violations against the person she's reporting, that's a smell."
"Five," I said. "Six, counting the porch light."
"Six." He made a note. "Mrs. Fisk sent us a clip from her camera on Saturday. It's the one she showed the officer, of you going to the mailbox at 10:14 p.m. On Saturday afternoon, after the officer asked her for all of her overnight footage, she sent us a second batch. That batch runs from 10 p.m. to 5:39 a.m. And then it picks up again at 6:03 a.m., when Mrs. Fisk can be seen walking out on her deck, looking down at your yard, and making a phone call. That's the call to our dispatch. The timestamp matches."
He cracked a sunflower seed. "Her camera is a continuous-record model. It doesn't record on motion. It records all the time. I looked up the specs. And she's told us the twenty-four missing minutes in the middle were, quote, a glitch."
"Cameras record continuously," Bev said. "People don't."
"That's about the size of it," Lattimore agreed. "Now, a glitch can happen. But it's a hell of a coincidence that the one glitch would land on exactly the twenty-four minutes in which Mr. Teague's foxes saw her walk down the hill, crouch at your mailbox, and walk back."
"So you'll arrest her," I said, before Bev could stop me.