The Last Precinct ks-11

by Patricia Cornwell

  cle in the area prior to last Saturday? He poses all this as if it would never occur to him that she would tarnish the truth.

  We know, of course, that Chandonne could not have been here after Saturday. He has been in custody since then. Kiffin is no help. She claims she was aware of nothing out of the ordinary except that early one morning she went out for firewood and noticed the tent was gone but the family's belongings were still here, or at least part of them. She can't swear to it, but the more Marino prods her, the more she believes she noticed the tent gone around eight A.M., last Friday. Chandonne murdered Diane Bray on Thursday night. Did he then flee afterward to James City County to hide? I imagine him appearing at the tent, a couple and their small children inside. One look at him and it is believable they would have jumped into their car and sped off without bothering to pack.

  We carry the trash bags to Marino's truck and put them in back. Again, Kiffin awaits our return, hands in the pockets of her jacket, her face rosy from the cold. The motel is straight ahead through pine trees, a small, boxy white structure, two stories with doors painted the color of evergreens. Behind the motel are more woods, then a wide creek that branches off from the James River.

  "How many people you got staying here right now?" Marino asks the woman who runs this dreadful tourist trap.

  "Right now? Maybe thirteen, depending on whether anybody else's checked out. Lot of people just leave their key in the room and I don't know they're gone until I go in to clean up. You know, I left my cigarettes in the house," she says to Marino without looking at him. "You mind?"

  Marino sets down his toolbox on the path. He shakes a cigarette loose from the pack and lights it for her. Her upper lip crinkles like crepe paper when she sucks in smoke, inhaling deeply and blowing out one side of her mouth. My lust for tobacco stirs. My fractured elbow complains about the cold. I

  can't stop thinking about the family in the tent and their terror_if it is true that Chandonne showed up and the family exists. If he did come directly here after murdering Bray, what happened to his clothes? He had to have gotten blood all over himself. Did he leave Bray's house and come out here covered with blood and frighten strangers out of their tent, and no one called the police or said a word to anyone?

  "How many people were staying here night before last, when the fire started?" Marino picks up his toolbox and we start walking again.

  "I know how many were checked in." She is vague. "Don't know who was still here. Eleven had checked in, including him."

  "Including the man who died in the fire?" It is my turn to ask questions.

  Kiffin throws a look at me. "That's right."

  'Tell me about his checking in," Marino says to her as we walk and pause to look around, and then walk on. "You see him drive up like we just did? Appears to me cars just pull right up to the front of your house."

  She starts shaking her head. "No sir. Didn't see no car. There was a knock on the door and I opened it. Told him to go next door to the office and I'd meet him there. He was a nice-looking man, well-dressed, didn't look like the usual I get, that much stands out clear as day."

  "He tell you his name?" Marino asks her.

  "Paid cash."

  "So if someone pays cash, you don't get them to fill out nothing."

  "Can if they want. Don't have to. I have a registration pad you can fill out and then I tear off the receipt. He said he didn't need a receipt."

  "He have an accent or anything?"

  "He didn't sound like he was from these parts."

  "Could you place where he sounded from? Northern? Maybe foreign?" Marino keeps on as we pause again beneath pines.

  She looks around, thinking and smoking as we follow her along a muddy path that leads to the motel parking lot. "Not deep South," she decides. "But he didn't sound like he was from a foreign country. You know, he didn't say much. Said as little as he had to. I got a feeling, you know, like he was in a hurry and sort of nervous, and he sure wasn't chatty." This sounds completely fabricated. Her tone of voice actually changes.

  "Anybody staying in these campers?" Marino then asks.

  "I rent 'em out. People don't come with their own campers right now. It's off-season for camping."

  "Anybody renting them now?"

  "No. Nobody."

  In front of the motel, a chair with ripped upholstery has been placed near a Coke machine and pay phone. There are several cars in the lot, American-made, not new. A Granada, an LTD, a Firebird. There is no sign of whoever might own them.

  "Who do you get this time of year?" I inquire.

  "A mixture," Kiffin goes on as we cross the parking lot to the south end of the building.

  I scan wet asphalt.

  "Folks who aren't getting along. That's a lot of it this time of year. People fussing and one or the other walks out or gets kicked out and needs a place to stay. Or people driving a long distance to visit family and need a place for the night. Or when the river floods like it did a couple months back, some people come here because I allow pets. And I get tourists."

  "People seeing Williamsburg and Jamestown?" I ask.

  "A fair number of people here to see Jamestown. That's picked up quite a bit since they started digging up the graves out there. Funny how people are."

  Chapter 22

  ROOM FOURTEEN IS ON THE FIRST LEVEL AT THE very end. Crime scene tape is a bright yellow ribbon across the door. The location is remote, at the edge of thick woods that buffer the motel from Route 5.

  I am especially interested in any vegetation or debris that might be on the asphalt directly in front of the room, where rescuers would have dragged the body. I note dirt and bits of dead leaves and cigarette butts. I am wondering if the fragment of candy bar wrapper I found adhering to the dead man's back came from inside the room or from out here in the parking lot. If it came from inside the room, that could mean the killer tracked it in, or it could mean that the killer walked through or close to the abandoned campsite at some point prior to the murder, unless the bit of paper had been inside the room for a while, perhaps tracked in by Kiffin herself when she came in to clean after the last guest checked out. Evidence is tricky. You always have to consider its origin and not draw conclusions based on where the evidence ended up. Fibers on a body, for example, might have been transferred from the

  Killer, who picked them up from a carpet where they were deposited originally by someone who tracked them into a house after yet another individual left them on a car seat.

  "Did he ask for a particular room?" I ask Kiffin as she goes through keys on the ring.

  "Said he wanted something private. Fourteen didn't have anybody on either side or above, so that's what I gave him. What'd you do to your arm?"

  "Slipped on ice."

  "Oh, that's too bad. You got to wear that cast a long time?"

  "Not much longer."

  "You get the sense he might have had anybody with him?" Marino asks her.

  "Didn't see anybody else." She speaks tersely with Marino but is friendlier toward me. I feel her glancing at my face frequently and have the sinking feeling she has seen my photograph in the papers or on television. "What kind of doctor did you say you are?" she quizzes me.

  "I'm a medical examiner."

  "Oh." She brightens. "Like Quincy. Used to love that show. You remember that one where he could tell everything about a person from one bone?" She turns the key in the lock and opens the door and the air turns acrid with the dirty stench of fire. "I just thought that was the most amazing thing. Race, gender, even what he did for a living and how big he was, and exactly when and how he died, all from one little bone." The door opens wide onto a scene that is as dark and filthy as a coal mine. "Can't tell you how much this is going to cost me," she says as we move past her and step inside. "Insurance won't ever cover something like this. Never does. Damn insurance companies."

  "I'm going to need you to wait outside," Marino says to Kiffin.

  The only light is what spills through the
open doorway, and I make out the shape of the double bed. In the center of it is a crater where the mattress burned down to the bed springs. Marino turns on a flashlight and a long finger of light moves through the room, starting with the closet just right of where I am Standing near the doorway. Two bent wire hangers dangle from the wooden rod. The bathroom is just left of the door, and against the wall opposite the bed is a dresser. Something is on top of the dresser, a book. It is open. Marino walks closer to illuminate the pages. "Gideon Bible," he says.

  The light moves on to the far end of the room, where there are two chairs and a small table before a window and a back door. Marino opens the curtains and wan sunlight seeps into the room. The only fire damage I can see is to the bed, which smoldered and produced a lot of dense smoke. Everything inside the room is covered with soot, and this is an unexpected forensic gift. "The entire room's been smoked," I marvel out loud.

  "Huh?" Marino shines the light around as I dig out my portable phone. I see no evidence that Stanfield tried looking for latent prints in here, not that I blame him. Most investigators would assume the intense soot and smoke damage would obliterate fingerprints, when in fact, the opposite is true. Heat and soot tend to process latent prints, and there is an old laboratory method called smoking used on nonporous objects such as shiny metals, which tend to have a Teflon effect when traditional dusting powders are applied. Latent prints are actually transferred to an object because the friction ridge surfaces of fingers and palms have oily residues on them. It is these residues that end up on some surface: a doorknob, a drinking glass, a window pane. Heat softens the residues, and smoke and soot then adhere to them. During cooling the residues become fixed or firm and the soot can be gently brushed away like dusting powder. Before Super Glue fuming and alternate light sources, it was not uncommon to conjure up prints by burning tarry pine chips, camphor and magnesium. It is very possible that beneath the patina of soot in this room there is a galaxy of latent fingerprints that have already been processed for us.

  I call fingerprints section chief Neils Vander at home and explain the situation, and he says he will meet us at the motel

  in two hours. Marino is caught up in other preoccupations, his

  attention fixated on some spot above the bed, where he is shining the light. "Holy shit," he mutters. "Doc, would you look at this?" He illuminates two sooty eyebolts screwed into the dry wall ceiling about three feet apart. "Hey!" he calls through the doorway to Kiffin.

  She peers inside the room and looks where he shines the light.

  "You got any idea why these bolts are in the ceiling?" he asks her.

  She gets a strange expression on her face, her voice going up a note, the way it does when she is being evasive, I think. "Never seen them before. Now I wonder how that happened?" she declares.

  "Last time you were in this room was when?" Marino asks her.

  "A couple days before he checked in. When I cleaned it after the last person checked out, the last person before him, I mean."

  "The bolts weren't here then?"

  "I didn't notice, if they were."

  "Mrs. Kiffin, you just hang outside there in case we got more questions."

  Marino and I put on gloves. He splays his fingers, rubber stretching and snapping. The window next to the back door overlooks a swimming pool that is filled with dirty water. Across from the bed is a small Zenith television on a stand, a note taped to it reminding guests to turn the TV off before they go out. The room is rather much what Stanfield described, but he did not mention the Gideon Bible open on the dresser, or that to the right of the bed near the floor there is an electrical outlet with two unplugged cords on the carpet next to it, one to the lamp on the bedside table, the other to the clock radio. The clock radio is old. It isn't digital. When it was unplugged, the hands stopped at 3:12 P.M. Marino tells Kiffin to step inside the room again. "What time did you say he checked in?" he asks.

  "Oh, 'round three." She is just inside the doorway, staring blankly at the clock. "Looks like he came in and unplugged the clock and the lamp, now doesn't it? That's kind of strange, unless maybe he was plugging something else in and needed the outlet. Some of these business types have those laptop computers."

  "Did you notice if he had one?" Marino glances at her.

  "I didn't notice he had anything except what looked like a car key and his wallet."

  "You didn't say nothing about a wallet. You saw a wallet?"

  "Pulled it out to pay me. Black leather, as I recall. Expensive looking, like everything else he had. Might have been alligator or something," she adds to her story.

  "How much cash he pay you and in what kind of bills?"

  "A hundred-dollar bill and four twenties. He told me to keep the change. The total was one hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents."

  "Oh yeah. The sixteen-oh-seven special," Marino says in a monotone. He doesn't like Kiffin. He certainly doesn't trust her worth a damn, but he keeps it to himself, playing her like a hand of cards. If I didn't know him so well, he might fool even me.

  "You got some kind of stepladder around here?" Marino says next.

  She hesitates. "Well, I guess so." She is gone again, the door left standing wide open.

  Marino gets down to take a closer look at the outlet and unplugged cords. "You think they plugged the heat gun in here?" He ponders this out loud.

  "It's possible, //"we're talking about a heat gun," I remind him.

  "I've used them to thaw my pipes and to get ice off my front steps. Works like a charm." He is looking under the bed with the flashlight. "Never had a case where one was used on a person. Jesus. He must've been gagged pretty good for no one to hear anything. Wonder why they unplugged both things, the lamp and the clock?"

  "Maybe so it didn't throw the circuit breaker?"

  "In a joint like this, yeah, maybe. A heat gun's probably about the same voltage as a blow-dryer. One-twenty, one-

  twenty-five. And a blow-dryer would probably knock out the

  lights in a dump like this."

  I move over to the dresser and look at the Bible. It is open to the sixth and seventh chapters of Ecclesiastes, and the ex- posed pages are sooty, the area of dresser under the Bible spared, indicating this was the position the Bible was in when the fire started. The question is whether the Bible was open like this before the victim checked in, or does it even belong with the room, for that matter? My eyes wander down lines and stop at the first verse of the seventh chapter. A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one's birth. I read it to Marino. I tell him that this section of Ecclesiastes is about vanity.

  "Kind of fits with the queer thing, don't it?" he comments as aluminum scrapes outside and Kiffin returns with a rush of wintry air. Marino takes a paint-spattered, bent ladder from her and opens the legs. He climbs up and shines the flashlight on the bolts. "Damn, I think I need new glasses. I can't see nothing," he says as I hold the ladder steady.

  "Want me to look?" I offer.

  "Help yourself." He climbs back down.

  I take a small magnifying lens from my satchel and up I go. He hands me the light and I examine the eyebolts. I can't see any fibers. If there are any, we are not going to have any luck collecting them here. The problem is how to preserve one type of evidence without ruining another, and there are three possible types of evidence that might be associated with the eyebolts: fingerprints, fibers and tool marks. If we dust off soot to look for latents, we might lose fibers that could match the ligature that might have been threaded through the eye-bolts, which we also can't unscrew without risking the introduction of new tool marks, assuming we use a tool such as pliers. The biggest threat is inadvertently eradicating any possible prints. In fact, the conditions and lighting are so bad that we shouldn't be examining anything here, really. I get an idea. "If you can hand me a couple baggies," I tell Marino. "And tape."

  He hands me two small, transparent plastic bags. I slip one over each eyebolt and caref
ully wrap tape around the top of the bag, careful not to touch any part of the bolt or the ceiling. I climb back down while Marino opens his tool box. "Hate to do this to you," he says to Kiffin, who hovers outside the door.

  hands deep in her pockets, trying to keep warm. "But I'm gonna have to cut out part of the ceiling."

  "Like that's gonna make much difference at this point," she says in a voice of resignation, or is it indifference I detect? "May as well," she adds.

  I am still wondering why the fire only smoldered. This has really got me stuck. I ask Kiffin what type of linens and mattress cover were on the bed.

  "Well, they were green." She seems sure of herself on this point. "The bedspread was dark green, sort of like the color the doors are painted. Not that we know what happened to the linens. The sheets were white."

  "Do you have any idea what they were made of?" I ask.

  "I'm pretty sure the bedspreads are polyester."

  Polyester is so combustible that I try to remember never to wear synthetic materials when I fly. If we have a crash landing and there is a fire, the last thing I want against my flesh is polyester. I may as well douse myself with gasoline. If a polyester bedspread had been on the bed when the fire was set, more than likely the entire room would have gone up in flames, and quickly. "Where did you get the mattresses?" I ask her.

  She hesitates. She doesn't want to te'l me. "Well," she finally gets around to what I believe is the truth, "new ones are awfully expensive. I get secondhand ones when I can."