In the written statement she gave that morning, Darlene had told Officer Kowalczyk that "she drives to Oregon all the time — I've seen her car go west on Saturdays." I do drive west on Saturdays. There's a farmers' market in Caldwell, which is in Idaho. I go there for the peaches.
The one thing Lattimore didn't have yet was the twenty-four missing minutes from Darlene's camera. And this is where I have to tell you about Rick.
Rick Fisk owned the account for the deck camera. He'd set it up himself, on his phone, at Darlene's request, the weekend he mounted it. Darlene had a login of her own, and she knew how to download a clip and how to delete one. But the app also kept a separate thirty-day cloud backup tied to the account owner, which could be restored only from the owner's login. Darlene didn't know about it. It's the sort of setting nobody reads about, because nobody reads the terms of service. Nobody except, apparently, the conservator who lived next door, and Rick.
Lattimore drove out to the county golf course on a Thursday morning and found Rick on the fourteenth fairway in a utility cart, looking at a patch of grass that had been killed by grubs. Lattimore told me later that he'd intended to ask for consent and, if he didn't get it, to come back with a warrant for the account. He didn't have to come back. He told Rick he was investigating the narcotics report from September 26th, that he believed there might be footage on Rick's account that mattered, and that he'd be grateful for it. Rick sat in the cart for what Lattimore estimated was a full minute, looking at the dead grass. Then he took out his phone, logged in, restored the backup, and forwarded all of September 26th to the detective's email, the entire night, without saying a word.
When it was done, he said, "Is she going to be all right?"
Lattimore said he didn't know.
Rick said, "She's been driving to Ontario every few weeks since last winter. Tells me she's visiting her sister in Payette. She doesn't sleep. Hasn't for years. I didn't say anything." He looked up at the detective. "I didn't think she'd do this. I swear to God, I didn't think she'd do this to that girl."
In the restored footage, at 5:43 a.m., Darlene Fisk came out of the back door of her own house onto the deck with Duchess on the leash. She stood there for a moment, looking down into my yard. Then she walked down the deck stairs, along the side of her house, and through the slice of my front yard visible past my garage, heading down the hill toward my mailbox and out of frame. At 5:49 she walked back into frame, up the hill, and into her house. At 6:03 she came back out onto the deck with her phone to her ear and her other hand pressed flat against her chest, like a woman in a television movie who has just found a body.
Her own camera, the one she had aimed at my yard to catch me doing something wrong, had caught her instead. The red light beside the lens had been on the whole time.
* * *
I didn't know any of that during the two weeks after the police came. All I knew was what I could see. I saw the five-hundred-dollar fine on my HOA account statement. I saw the yellow notice taped to the pool gate with my address on it, which I can only assume was meant for the other residents, since I don't swim. I saw people from up the street who'd smiled at me in July cross to the far sidewalk on their walks. And I saw Darlene.
Darlene was everywhere that fortnight. She was in the clubhouse. She walked Duchess past my house three times a day, slowly, glancing at my mailbox each time with a little wince, as if it were the site of a tragedy. She posted on Facebook about "community resilience" and "the courage to speak up" and, in a post that Lucía screenshotted for my binder with a level of glee I had to gently discourage, "the importance of trusting your instincts even when the so-called experts tell you you're wrong." She formed what she called the Larkspur Safety Committee, which as far as I could tell was her, the board treasurer Sharon Pike, and two men who enjoyed wearing reflective vests. She emailed the entire membership a notice that the committee would lead a Community Safety Walk through the neighborhood on Saturday, October 10th, at ten in the morning, "to reinforce our shared standards and demonstrate that Larkspur is a neighborhood that watches out for itself."