It was a white box truck, a small one, with DESERT SHINE SUPPLY in blue letters on the side and a phone number with an area code from Phoenix. It had backed through the maintenance gate, the one with the padlock that's supposed to be for landscapers, and stopped beside the pump house with its rear door rolled up. Kenton Brandvold was standing at the back of the truck. He's in his fifties, compact and sunburned, with a shaved head and wraparound sunglasses he never seems to take off even indoors, and he was wearing a Desert Shine polo shirt with the sleeves straining at his arms. He was handing blue plastic jugs, the four-gallon kind with a handle molded into the top, down to Everett, who was carrying them two at a time from the truck to the pump house door and setting them down on the concrete pad.
Glynis was there too, in a wide straw hat and a white linen shirt, holding a folded piece of paper and standing in the slice of shade along the building's wall.
It was the first time I'd seen the chemical delivery. It was also, I realized, the first time I'd seen Kenton anywhere near the pool. I took out my phone and hit record, and I want to say exactly why, because later a defense attorney spent a great deal of time asking me. I recorded because I had spent a year trying to find out where the chemicals came from and here they were. That's all. I had no idea anything was about to happen. I thought I was finally going to get a picture of a label.
My phone was propped on top of the block wall, between two terracotta pots of rosemary I keep there to make the wall look friendlier. The video is four minutes and nine seconds long. I've watched it more times than I've watched anything in my life, so I can tell you exactly what's in it.
For the first minute, it's just unloading. Twelve jugs come off the truck. Everett stacks them in two rows of six against the pump house wall. Some of the jugs have printed labels, the yellow-and-black ones with the diamond hazard symbols. Some of them have white rectangular stickers with words handwritten in marker. You can't read them from my wall, not at first, but later, when the police had a forensic technician enhance the frames, you could read two of them clearly. One said LIQ CHLOR 12.5. The other one said the same thing.
At one minute and fourteen seconds, Kenton says, loud enough to carry across the gravel because he's one of those men who talks as if everyone around him is slightly deaf, "The ones on the end there are the reorder. Same as last time, Everett, you just pour 'em in the feeder."
Everett says something I can't hear.
At one minute and thirty-one seconds, Glynis steps out of the shade. She takes Everett's arm, very lightly, at the elbow, and she says, clearly, "Honey. It's the chlorine. You put the chlorine in the tank like always. Kenton's labeled them."
"I know what chlorine is," Everett says. He sounds tired, and a little hurt.
"I know you do."
At two minutes and two seconds, Kenton closes the truck's door and says, "Glynis, the invoice is in the usual spot. You want me to put the inspector down for Tuesday again?"