They had to get in before she flushed her stash.
***It looks like the adrenaline cowboys are taking over policy on raids like this. There is no glory in sending in someone half a day earlier to stop up the sewer line (now they can't flush drugs down the toilet, can they?) and then conduct daylight operations in full uniform right afterwards. Kinda like the branch Davidians -- ATF could have picked up Koresh when he was on his weekly run to get groceries, but there's no glory in it. If police work started to become as mundane as stopping toilets & picking up folks at the grocery store, adrenaline cowboys would lose interest and enroll in the war in Iraq, where we have real work for them to do.
Exactly, now where would the "fun" be in doing something low-key and mundane.