"I told you," I said. It came out smaller than I meant it to. "I told everybody."
"You did," she said. "For the record, Mrs. Kowal, I wrote it down the day I met you. 'Owner states samples are human. Owner is a retired ER nurse.' It's in my notes." Another rustle. "The county's dismissing the nuisance complaint against your dog with prejudice. Paloma Ferro will get the order tomorrow. And as of about an hour ago, this stopped being an animal case."
"What is it now?"
"Now," said Officer Ybarra, "it's a sheriff's case. I walked the whole file over myself. Chain of custody forms, my notes, the lab report, the Breck recording, the camera logs from Crestline. I handed it to a detective named Amberley." She paused. "Somebody fabricated physical evidence and submitted it to a county agency in order to get an animal seized. In this state, when you know an official proceeding is underway and you plant something to influence it, that's not a misdemeanor. That's tampering with evidence. That's a felony."
Detective Joel Amberley came to my house two days later. He was a big, slow-moving man in his fifties with a gray mustache, a sport coat that had been to a lot of crime scenes, and the specific patience of a person who has spent his career waiting for other people to say the thing they don't want to say. He sat at my kitchen table and drank my coffee and let Rook sniff him thoroughly, from shoes to belt, and when Rook was done and lay down at his feet, he said, "Well. I'm approved."
He asked me to go through everything, from the first letter, and I did. He took notes on a legal pad in tiny block capitals. When I got to the part about the casserole, he stopped writing and looked up.
"She asked you to stop the testing."
"She asked if I could."
"After the results were back, or before?"
"Before."