Cole closed the folder and looked at the yard again, at the garbage and the bags and the flattened flowers.
"This shows a serious pattern," she said.
"She wants the yard declared unsafe," Marcus said. He had said it to himself before, but saying it to an officer made it sound more real, and more frightening. "And now I think she does not want me digging."
Cole nodded, and she went to the rear corner where the crew had found the cap. She crouched down and brushed the soil aside with a gloved hand, and there it was, the metal cap, still stamped P-47C, still about four inches wide. She photographed it carefully, from two angles, and then she went to the leaking bag by the gate and collected a sample from it, sealing it in an evidence bag with the same unhurried professionalism she had shown since she arrived.
"I've already checked with the utility companies," Marcus said. "It's not one of their markers. They said so."
Cole nodded again. "The video supports criminal damage," she said. "And possible assault. No serious physical injury, from what I can see, but you should get checked by a doctor anyway. And do not confront her. If she comes back, call us."
Marcus agreed. He watched her finish her notes and walk back through the side gate, and then he stood alone in the yard with the smell and the flies and the ruined flower bed, and he thought about what Cole had said. Criminal damage and possible assault. That was what the morning amounted to, on paper. But Marcus knew, the way he had known standing in the garbage an hour earlier, that the paper did not cover it. Lorraine had not dumped garbage on him because she hated his garden. She had dumped it because she needed something, and the garden was in the way, and the cap under the root cluster was part of it, and the complaints and the photographs and the notices were all part of it too. He did not know what was underneath his flower bed yet. But he knew somebody did, and that somebody was Lorraine Vale, and she had just shown him, in the most public and humiliating way she could manage, that she was willing to do a great deal to keep him from finding out.
After Cole left, Marcus did not go back inside right away. He stood on the patio and looked at the yard the way Cole had looked at it, trying to see it as a stranger would, and what he saw depressed him almost as much as the garbage itself. To a stranger, it looked like a neglected yard. The garbage was on top, but underneath it the beds were still ragged at the edges, the wooden borders still partly collapsed, the fence still weathered. A stranger would not know about the four months. A stranger would see the rot and the flies and the overturned pots and think: this is a man who does not take care of his property. That was the trick of it, Marcus realized, and it was a clever trick, because it used the truth as camouflage. The garden was a work in progress. It had been overgrown when he inherited it, and four months of Saturdays had not finished it. Lorraine had taken a half-restored garden and made it look like an abandoned one, and then she had filmed herself discovering it, as if she had found it that way.
He went inside and spread the folder out on the dining table, the way Cole had spread it on the patio table, and he went through it page by page, slowly, the way he went through a hospital account when a charge did not match a procedure. The folder told a story he had lived but never quite seen whole. The first pages were the March pages: the photograph of the metal cap, the crew's note about the root cluster, the notice about unauthorized excavation near protected ground. He remembered the crew leader's face when Lorraine told them to leave, the way the man had looked from Lorraine's badge to Marcus and back again, as if he were trying to decide which of them had authority over a flower bed. The crew had left, and Marcus had not blamed them.