It had never been about my dog. My dog was just the thing in the room she was already afraid of.
XI.
The state crime lab took seven weeks.
Detective Amberley called me on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. He said the lab had been unable to develop a usable profile from the oldest sample, the dried one from under the bench, which didn't surprise anybody. But from the two samples Officer Ybarra had collected at the foot of Candace Vreeland's own front steps, they'd developed a partial profile from one and a nearly complete profile from the other. And the profile matched the DNA recovered from the lipstick-printed rim of a coffee cup that had been placed at the curb in front of Candace Vreeland's house on garbage day, with a random match probability, he said, of roughly one in several hundred billion.
"That's more people than have ever lived," I said.
"That's the general idea," said Detective Amberley.
With the match in hand, he got a warrant for her financial records, and the records gave him two more things. The first was a string of transfers from a checking account in the name of Lakeshore Paving and Seal LLC into Candace's personal account, which closed the loop on the reserve fund. The second was a purchase, on July 28, four days before the first deposit at the mailbox island, from a sporting goods store on the bypass. One portable camping toilet, five-gallon, with snap-on seat. One package of disposable waste bags. One two-gallon white plastic bucket with a lid.
When he told me that last part I put my hand over my mouth, and he waited, and after a minute he said, "You can laugh, Mrs. Kowal. Everybody at the office did."
"I'm not laughing," I said, laughing. "I'm not. It's just—she had a system."
"She always has a system," said Detective Amberley. "That's what's going to sink her. People who wing it, you can almost never prove anything. People with systems leave receipts."