"I know," I said. "That's why."
She stood there with it. Then she said, quietly, "Is there any way you could ask the county to stop the testing? Since it's all been resolved? It seems like such a waste of everyone's time."
"I couldn't stop it if I wanted to," I said. "It's not mine to stop."
Something moved behind her face then. Not anger. Something more like a person standing at the top of a staircase in the dark, reaching for a step that wasn't there. She nodded once. She turned and went down my walk with the casserole, and I watched her cross the street, and halfway across she stopped and stood in the middle of Sandpiper Court for a moment, perfectly still, as if she'd forgotten which house was hers.
That afternoon, Neville Albers from Crestline called Paloma Ferro. He was nervous, Paloma said. He talked fast. He said that at about 11:40 the previous night, someone using the board president's administrator login had accessed the clubhouse camera system's cloud archive and attempted to delete all stored recordings from August 1 through September 30. The system had flagged it as a bulk deletion and required a second administrator's approval, which was him. He had not approved it. He thought, given everything, someone should know.
"And then," Paloma said, "he told me something else. He said that when he went into the archive to see what she'd been trying to delete, there wasn't much there. Because the camera that covers the pond path had been switched to 'offline' from the same admin login on every single night there was an incident. Switched off at about four-thirty. Switched back on at about six."
IX.
The results came back on the first Monday in October. Officer Ybarra called me herself, at 4:50 in the afternoon, ten minutes before the end of her shift.
"I wanted you to hear it from me," she said. "The lab ran a species identification panel on all three samples. It's a PCR test. They look for DNA markers specific to dogs, cats, raccoons, deer, a handful of others, and human." She paused, and I heard paper rustle. "No canine DNA was detected in any sample. Human DNA was detected in all three."
I was standing at my kitchen counter. Rook was asleep on the cool tile by the back door with his legs stretched out and his paws twitching, chasing something in a dream. I put my hand flat on the counter.