He forced himself to move methodically, the way he moved through a billing discrepancy at work: one step, then the next, no skipping. He went inside through the back door, careful not to touch the doorframe with his dirty hands, and peeled the shirt off over his head in the laundry room, turning it inside out so the stained side folded inward. He put it in a clear plastic bag and sealed it, the way he had seen people on television preserve evidence, and he felt foolish and then immediately not foolish, because Cole would later tell him it was exactly the right thing to do. He washed his hands and his neck at the kitchen sink with hot water and soap, twice, and the water ran brown and then gray and then clear. His neck was red where the split bag had struck it, a broad pink mark that would darken into a bruise by evening, but the skin was not broken, and he was grateful for that small fact in a morning full of larger ones.
He took his phone and went back out, not into the bed itself but along the patio edge, and photographed everything the way Lorraine had photographed his yard so many times before: the garbage on the flowers, the bags by the gate, the overturned pots, the stain spreading from the leaking bag, the bin tracks in the grass where Lorraine had pulled the bin away. He photographed the fence line too, and the rear gate, and the latch, which was closed but which he now realized had not stopped anyone. He did not touch the garbage. He did not move the bags. He left everything exactly as it was, because something in him understood, even through the shock, that the yard was now a scene and not just a mess, and scenes should not be cleaned before someone official has seen them.
The call took him two tries. The first time, his hands were still shaking enough that he misdialed, and he had to set the phone down, breathe, and start again. He gave the dispatcher his name and his address and described what had happened in plain sentences: his neighbor had dumped garbage on him in his own backyard and filmed it. The dispatcher asked whether he was injured, and Marcus said he did not think so, not seriously, and the dispatcher asked whether the neighbor was still there, and Marcus said no, she had left, and the dispatcher said an officer would come. Marcus sat on the patio and waited, and the waiting was the worst part, because waiting gave the morning time to replay itself: the bin rising above the fence, the rush of rot, Lorraine's calm voice calling it documentation. He kept coming back to the bags by the gate, because the bags were the detail that changed the story. A bin tipped in anger was one thing. Bags placed before sunrise, pots overturned in advance, a scene arranged while he slept, was something else entirely. Somebody who arranges a scene has a plan. Somebody with a plan has a reason. And the reason, Marcus was now certain, had nothing to do with roses.
Officer Dana Cole arrived at 8:26.
She came through the side gate unhurried, taking in the yard before she spoke to him. Marcus met her on the patio in a clean shirt, and could tell from her look at the flower bed that she was already cataloging: garbage, flattened flowers, bags by the gate, overturned pots. The smell had worsened in the hour since Lorraine left, flies thicker now over the rot in the heat.
"I bagged my shirt," Marcus said. "I haven't touched anything in the yard."
"Good," Cole said. "Show me the video."
Marcus took her to the patio, where the small security camera sat beneath the roofline, and he played the recording for her. He watched it with her, then played it again, because she asked him to and because he wanted to be sure of what he had seen. The video was short and it was plain. Lorraine pushed the bin through the rear gate. She lifted it above the fence. The trash fell directly onto Marcus where he knelt by the flower bed. There was no ambiguity in it, no angle from which it looked like an accident, or like Marcus stepping underneath a bin already falling. She lifted it, tipped it, and it fell on him.