The Last Precinct

"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 Chando

"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 go

She watches us walk off. Marino and I talk in low voices. Hours before Chando

"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 Chando

"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 Chando

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 Chando

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 Chando

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