He got two bags the next Thursday, at 5:15 a.m., in an unmarked pickup. I didn't see it. Mr. Huynh did. He wrote it in his notebook. Five-fifteen. Man in pickup takes trash from house on corner. Very quick. Professional.
In the bags, according to the report I'd read months later, there were coffee pods, junk mail, a bottle of wine, a mostly uneaten chicken and wild rice casserole, and a paper cup from the coffee shop on Route 9 with a lipstick print on the rim and a plastic lid, which the detective bagged and labeled and drove to the state crime lab the same afternoon.
X.
You would think that when the county declared, in writing, that the waste was human, the neighborhood would turn around overnight. It didn't. People are strange about being wrong in public. Some of them get louder.
Candace didn't post anything for a week. Then she posted a long statement, clearly lawyered, in which she said that she was "aware of rumors" circulating about her, that she had cooperated fully with every agency, and that she would not be "bullied out of the community I've served for nine years." She said that she had gone out to her front walk at five in the morning on the day of the incident because she'd heard a noise, and had bent down to look at something, and had gone back inside. She said that anyone could have put the waste there, including the owner of the dog in question, who "has made no secret of her personal animosity toward me and toward the Board," and who had, she pointed out, unusual professional familiarity with human biological material.
That one had a hundred and three comments in an afternoon.
To my surprise, the person who answered it first was Kayla Breck. She wrote: My two year old put her hands in that. I believed you, Candace. I yelled at an old woman on my lawn because of you. Don't you dare. And then, under it, a link to the clip from Wyatt's garage camera, the figure coming out of Candace's front door at 5:07 and bending at the foot of the steps.
Not everybody was convinced. Vince Ostrander posted that the clip was "grainy and inconclusive." Someone on Kingfisher wrote that they'd known Candace for nine years and she would never do something like that, she organized the toy drive. Someone else wrote that it was all a distraction from the real issue, which was that the pool still hadn't been resurfaced, and that one got the most likes of anything.
Thad Mize knocked on my door that Saturday at nine-thirty at night.
I almost didn't answer. Nobody knocks at nine-thirty at night with good news. But Rook went to the door and stood there with his tail moving slowly, which meant it was someone he'd met and decided about, and when I looked through the peephole it was Thad, in a windbreaker, holding a manila folder to his chest with both arms, like a schoolboy in the rain.