Lattimore looked at me over his reading glasses, kindly.
"Ms. Pruitt, I'm going to do this right," he said. "I've got a trail camera video of a woman putting something in your lavender. It's a good video. But a good defense lawyer says, 'She was picking up after her dog, and the bag was already there.' I want this to be the kind of case nobody can say that about. So I'm going to need you to do something for me."
"Anything," I said.
"I'd like your fingerprints," he said. "Elimination prints. Voluntary."
Bev looked at me. I looked at her. She nodded.
"Why?" I asked, as the technician rolled my fingers across a glass plate in the next room, one at a time, the way you'd roll a wet sheet onto felt.
"Because those dispensary bags are thick plastic," Lattimore said from the doorway. "Matte on the outside, but the inside of the zipper seal is smooth as a mirror. You open one of those and close it, you leave a print on the inside of the seal like you've signed your name. Whoever filled that bag, or opened it to have one last look before she buried it, she left me something. And it's protected by the plastic. Raccoons and lavender don't touch it."
* * *
I learned most of what happened next later, from the police reports, which Bev obtained through discovery in the civil case. I read them in the conservation lab on my lunch breaks with the same care I'd give a land patent from 1887, and I've read them so many times I could recite them. Some of it I learned from Rick Fisk himself, much later, on a cold morning in a driveway, but I'll get to that.
The print on the inside of the zipper seal was a clean partial thumb, eleven points of comparison. It wasn't mine.
Lattimore ran it through the state system, not expecting much. Darlene had no criminal record. But a print database doesn't only hold criminals. It holds anyone whose job has required a fingerprint-based background check. In Idaho that includes teachers, nurses, school bus drivers, and, from 2009 to 2015, the licensed operator of Little Sprouts Family Daycare on Wren Court in Kestrel Creek. That was Darlene Fisk. She ran a daycare for six years before she ran the HOA. The state had her prints in a file, and the file had waited, patient as paper, for this.
The black bag had a white label on the front, and Lattimore had already photographed it under magnification, because the label was the first thing he'd noticed. It was a compliance label from a licensed dispensary called Treasure Valley Green, on East Idaho Avenue in Ontario, Oregon. Ontario sits just across the Snake River from the Idaho line, about fifty minutes from Kestrel Creek, and it has more dispensaries per head than almost anywhere in the country, for the simple reason that it's the first town in Oregon you hit when you drive west from Idaho. The label listed a strain name, a weight of 3.5 grams, a THC percentage, a harvest date, a packaging date, and a twenty-four-character package identification number. It said, in tiny print, For use only by adults 21 and older. Keep out of reach of children.