The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia (читаем книги онлайн TXT) 📗

"PayDay candy bars," I say to Marino. I look at Kiffin as I open my satchel. "Know anybody out here who eats a lot of PayDay candy bars and picks apart the wrappers?"

"Well, it didn't come from my house." As if we have accused her, or maybe Zack and his sweet tooth.

I do not carry my aluminum crime scene case to scenes where there is no body. But I always keep an emergency kit in my satchel, a heavy-duty freezer bag filled with disposable gloves, evidence bags, swabs, a tiny vial of distilled water and gunshot residue (GSR) kits, among other items. I remove the cap from a GSR kit. It is nothing more than a small, clear plastic stub with an adhesive tip that I use to collect three hairs from the pillow and two from the blanket. I seal the stub and the hairs inside a small transparent plastic evidence bag.

"You don't mind my asking?" Kiffin says to me. "What are you doing that for?"

"Think I'll just bag all this crap, the whole campsite, and take it in to the labs." Marino is suddenly low-key, calm like a seasoned poker player. He knows how to handle Kiffin, and now she has to be handled because he also knows all too well that hypertrichotic people have unique hair, fine, unpig-

mented, rudimentary, baby-like hair. Only baby hair is not six

or seven inches long like the hair Chandonne shed at his crime scenes. It is possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has been to this campground. "You manage this place by yourself?" Marino asks Kiffin.

"Pretty much."

"When did the family in the tent leave? It's not exactly tent weather."

"They were here right before it snowed. Late last week."

"You ever find out why they left in such a hurry?" Marino keeps probing in his bland tone.

"Haven't heard from them, not a word."

"We're going to need to take a better look at what all they left behind."

Kiffin blows on her bare hands to warm them and hugs herself, turning away from the wind. She looks back at her house and you can almost see her contemplating what kind of trouble life holds for her and her family this time. Marino motions for me to follow him. "Wait here," he tells Kiffin. "We'll be right back. Just gonna get something out of my truck. Don't touch nothing, all right?"

She watches us walk off. Marino and I talk in low voices. Hours before Chandonne appeared at my front door, Marino was out with the response team searching for him, and they discovered where he was hiding in Richmond in the mansion under major renovation on the James River, very close to my neighborhood. Since he rarely if ever went out during daylight hours, we assume, his comings and goings went undetected as he hid in the house and helped himself to whatever was there. Until this moment, it never occurred to any of us that Chandonne might have stayed anyplace else.

"You think he scared off whoever was in that tent so he could use it?" Marino unlocks his truck and reaches in the back of the cab where I know, for one thing, he keeps a pump-action shotgun. "Because I gotta tell ya, Doc. Something we noticed when we went inside that house on the James was junk food wrappers everywhere. A lot of candy bar wrappers." He lifts out a red tool box and shuts the door of the truck. aLike he's got a real sugar thing."

"Do you remember what kind of junk food?" I remember all the Pepsis Chandonne drank while Berger was interviewing him.

"Snickers bars. I don't remember if there were PayDays. But candy. Peanuts. Those little bags of Planter's peanuts, and now that I think of it, the wrappers were all tore up."

"Christ," I mutter, suddenly chilled to the marrow. "I wonder if he might have low blood sugar." I try to be clinical, to regain my balance. Fear returns like a swarm of bats.

"What the hell was he doing out here?" Marino says, and he keeps staring in the direction of Kiffin in the distance, making sure she isn't tampering with anything in a campsite that has now become part of a crime scene. "And how the hell did he get here? Maybe he did have a car."

"Any vehicles at the house where he was hiding?" I ask as Kiffin watches our return, a solitary figure in red plaid, breath emerging in smoky puffs.

"The people that own the mansion, they didn't keep any cars there while all the work was going on," Marino tells me in a voice Kiffin can't hear. "Maybe he stole something and kept it parked somewhere it wasn't going to be noticed. I just assumed the squirrel didn't even know how to drive, seeing as how he pretty much lived in the dungeon in his family's house in Paris."

"Yes. More assumptions," I mutter, remembering Chandonne's claiming he drove one of those green motorcycles to clean Paris sidewalks, doubting the story but not much else any longer. We are back at the picnic table, and Marino sets down the toolbox and opens it. He gets out leather work gloves and puts them on, then shakes open several fifty-gallon heavy-duty garbage bags and I hold them open. We fill three bags, and he cuts open a fourth and drapes sections of black plastic over the baby carriage and tapes them together. While he is doing this, he explains to Kiffin that it is possible someone scared off the family who was staying in this tent. He suggests that maybe a stranger claimed squatter's rights at this site, even if for only a night. Did she at any point have a sense of anything out of the ordinary, including an unfamiliar veto- 27!

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.