Unfortunately, he was serious.
“They might tell me something about her state of mind before she died,” I added.
“No problem. I’ll have Documents check them for prints, then hand them over to you. And I think we’d better have Documents take a look at the paper, too,” he added, referring to the sheet of blank paper on the bed.
“Right,” Lucero said drolly. “Maybe she wrote a suicide note in disappearing ink.
“Come “Come on,” Marino said to me. “I want to show you a couple things.”
He took me into the living room, where an artificial Christmas free cowered in a corner, bent from copious gaudy ornaments and strangled by tinsel, lights, and angel hair. Gathered near its base were boxes of candy and cheeses, bubble bath, a glass jar of what looked like spiced tea, and a ceramic unicorn with blazing blue eyes and gilded horn. The gold shag carpet, I suspected, was the origin of the fibers I had noticed on the bottom of Jennifer Deighton’s socks and under her fingernails.
Marino slipped a small flashlight from a pocket and squatted.
“Take a look,” he said.
I got down beside him as the beam of light illuminated metallic glitter and a bit of slender gold cord in the deep pile of the carpet around the base of the tree.
“When I got here, the first thing I checked was to see if she had any presents under the tree,” Marino said, switching the flashlight off. “Obviously, she opened them early. And the wrapping paper and cards got disposed of right over there in the fireplace – it’s full of paper ash, some pieces of foil-type paper still unburned. The lady across the street says she noticed smoke coming out of the chimney right before it got dark last night.”
“Is this neighbor the one who called the police?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“That I’m not clear on. I got to talk to her.”
“When you do, see if you can find. out anything about this woman’s medical history, if she had psychiatric problems, et cetera. I’d like to know who her physician is.
“I’m going over there in a few minutes. You can came with me and ask her yourself.”
I thought of Lucy waiting for me at home as I continued taking in details. In the center of the room, my eyes stopped at four small square indentations in the carpet.
“I noticed that, too,” Marino said. “Looks like someone brought a chair in here, probably from the dining room. There’s four chairs around the dining room table. All of ’em have square legs.”
“Another thing you might consider doing,” I thought out loud, “is checking her VCR. See if she had programmed it to record anything. That might tell us something more about her, too.”
“Good idea.” We left the living room, passing through the small dining room with an oak table and four straight-backed chairs. The braided rug on the hardwood floor looked either new or rarely walked on.
“Looks like the room she pretty much lived in was this one,” Marino said as we crossed a hallway and entered what clearly was her office.
The room was crammed with the paraphernalia needed to run a small business, including a fax machine, which I investigated immediately. It was turned off, the line connected to it plugged into a single jack in the wall. I looked around some more as my mystification grew. A personal computer, postage machine, various forms, and envelopes crowded a table and the desk Encyclopedias and books on parapsychology, astrology, zodiac signs, and Eastern and Western religions lined bookcases. I noted several different translations of the Bible and dozens of ledgers with dates written on the spines.
Near the postage machine was a stack of what appeared to be subscription forms, and I picked up one. For three hundred dollars a year, you could call as often as once a day and Jennifer Deighton would spend up to three minutes telling you your horoscope “based on personal details, including the Alignment of the planets at the moment of your birth.”
For an additional two hundred dollars a year, she would throw in “a weekly reading.”