"You'll have one. Captain Yarbrough will walk you out."
The SBI sent Special Agent Maxine Mbatha, a tall, unhurried woman from the Raleigh field office with reading glasses pushed up into her gray locs and a canvas tote bag full of legal pads. She set up in a borrowed conference room at the district attorney's office, not at the police station, which I'd requested, and for the next five weeks I saw her exactly four times, always with Priscilla Nwosu present, and she told me exactly as much as she needed to and no more. I liked her enormously.
What I know about her investigation, I know mostly from what became public later, in the affidavits and the grand jury's findings and the newspaper, and some of it from what Maxine told me in the last of those meetings, when she was done.
The nuisance program in Fernhill had designated a hundred and four properties in four years. Seventy-one of them were in three neighborhoods: Bittern Ridge, Lantern Hill, and a little enclave of older houses off Tanner Road near Mount Gilead. In each of those three neighborhoods, a large share of the calls that triggered designation came not through 911 or the regular non-emergency line but through Sergeant Dobrowski's liaison phone, from a small number of "community partners." In Bittern Ridge, that partner was Marcella Vasbinder. She had made two hundred and twelve reports in four years. Dobrowski had logged almost all of them as calls for service, whether or not an officer ever went. Some of the logged calls were for things that had never happened at all. Dobrowski had written them up from her emails, sometimes days later, in batches.
That was the first layer, and it was ugly enough. But it wasn't the part that surprised me.
The part that surprised me came out of Sergeant Dobrowski's personal phone, which he turned over to Agent Mbatha on the advice of his lawyer in the third week, along with a proffer, because he had figured out, a little faster than his boss, which way the wind was blowing. It was the texts. Not between Dobrowski and Marcella. Between Dobrowski and Garrett Kessling.
Marcella hadn't chosen the houses.
For four years, Dobrowski had been sending Marcella what he called "watch lists." Friendly, every month or so. Addresses the department was "concerned about," properties "showing early signs," households that might "need eyes on them." He presented them as intelligence, as a favor to an engaged community leader, and she took them as exactly that, and she watched. She watched the way only a frightened, grieving, conscientious woman with a flashlight and nothing else to do at four in the morning can watch. Every lawn a little too long, every car a little too old, every unfamiliar face. She reported it all, and every report became a call, and every call became a number in a spreadsheet, and when the number reached three, Garrett Kessling, as the chief's designee, signed the designation. Then the city fines started. Then, under the amendment to Article Nine, which, it turned out, Dobrowski had suggested to Marcella over coffee three and a half years earlier as "something other HOAs are doing," the HOA fines started. Then the liens. Then the foreclosure. Then Tidewater.
And the watch lists, it turned out, didn't come from crime data. They came from a spreadsheet that Tamara Kessling kept, of properties in those three neighborhoods with elderly owners, owners with liens or tax delinquencies, owners recently widowed, owners who'd inherited and lived out of state, owners who didn't speak English well. Properties, in the language of the spreadsheet, with "low resistance."