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

"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.