He met them at the front door and did not invite them in. He stood in the doorway, phone in hand, and asked what they wanted. Lorraine answered before Douglas could speak. She said they were there on an urgent sanitation complaint, and that Douglas had an inspection authorization. She held out a sheet of paper without handing it to him, as if it were meant to be obeyed rather than read. Marcus asked to see it properly, and Douglas took it from her and held it out. It was an inspection authorization for an urgent sanitation complaint, naming his address and backyard, but not the garbage Lorraine had dumped that morning, nor the video.
Marcus refused entry. He said it plainly, without raising his voice, and he held up his phone. He said he had a recording of what had happened that morning, and he offered to show it. Douglas glanced at the phone and then at Lorraine, and Lorraine said the incident was separate from the present condition of the yard. Marcus played the video anyway. He held the phone where all four of them could see it, and the small screen showed Lorraine pushing the bin through the rear gate, lifting it above the fence, and tipping the garbage onto him as he knelt by the flower bed. The sound was thin and distant on the phone speaker, but the picture was clear enough. Douglas watched for only a few seconds. He looked away before the bin finished tipping, and he said the incident was separate from the condition they were there to inspect. He said it as if a yard could be judged without asking how it had come to look that way.
Lorraine spoke next, and her voice was calm. She said she had been attempting to return waste she had found against her own fence. She said Marcus had stepped beneath the bin as she was moving it. She said it as if it were reasonable, without looking at the phone. Elaine Harper, who had been standing slightly behind the others, looked at the screen and then at Lorraine, and she said, quietly, that the video showed Lorraine pouring it on him. Lorraine did not answer Elaine directly. She turned back to Douglas and said the sanitation concern was urgent, and that the yard needed to be inspected now.
Douglas walked past Marcus into the backyard. Marcus followed, recording and narrating what he saw for a record independent of anyone else's memory. Douglas stopped at the dead rat beside the fence and looked at it. He stopped at the wet bags near the rear gate and looked at those. He stopped at the flower bed, where the flowers were buried under garbage, and he looked at that too. He did not ask how any of it arrived there. He wrote notes on a small pad as he walked, and he did not show Marcus what he was writing. Lorraine walked beside him, and she pointed things out as if she were guiding a tour. She pointed to the rat. She pointed to the bags. She pointed to the damaged flowers. Each time she pointed, Douglas nodded and wrote something down. Marcus kept recording, and he kept his distance, because Cole had told him not to confront Lorraine, and he was trying to follow that advice even as the inspection unfolded in front of him.
Then Lorraine directed Douglas to the rear corner of the yard, near the fence, where the soil had sunk into a shallow dip. The dip had appeared three weeks earlier, and Marcus had noticed it when he was clearing that section of the garden. He had not thought much of it at the time. It was a shallow hollow in the soil, the kind of thing that happens when ground settles after rain. Lorraine pointed at it now as if it were the most important thing in the yard, and Douglas walked over to it and pressed the toe of his boot against the soil. The soil sank slightly under his weight. It gave way a little, the way soft ground does after a wet spring, and Douglas straightened up and said the words Marcus would remember for the rest of the case. He said it was a possible subsurface void.