A sunburnt man was looking for a BB gun for his son’s tenth birthday, while an older man in a white suit was inquiring about snakebite kits and mosquito repellent. When my patience was no more, I interrupted.
‘Excuse me,’ I said.
The clerk, who was college age, didn’t seem to hear me at first.
‘Thing is, you should check with your doctor before using a snakebite kit,’ the clerk was saying to the elderly man in white.
‘How the hell am I supposed to do that when I’m out in the middle of the woods somewhere and some copperhead’s just bit me?’
‘I meant check with him before you go out in the woods, sir.’
As I listened to their backward logic I could stand it no longer.
‘Snakebite kits are not only useless, but they’re harmful,’ I said. ‘Tourniquets and local incision, sucking out the venom and all that just make matters worse. If you get bitten,’ I said to the man in white, ‘what you need to do is immobilize that part of your body, and avoid damaging first aid, and get to a hospital.’
The two men were startled.
‘So there’s no point in taking anything along?’ the man in white asked me. ‘No point in buying anything, you’re saying?’
‘Nothing but a good pair of boots and a walking stick you can poke around with,’ I replied. ‘Stay out of tall grass and don’t stick your hands into hollows or holes. Since venom is transported through the body by the lymphatic system, broad compression bandages — like an Ace bandage — are good, and a splint to keep the limb absolutely immobilized.’
‘You some kind of doctor?’ the clerk asked.
‘I’ve dealt with snake bites before.’
I didn’t add that in those instances, the victims had not lived.
‘I’m just wondering if you have knife sharpeners here,’ I said to the clerk.
‘Kitchen sharpeners or ones for camping?’
‘Let’s start with camping,’ I said.
He pointed to a wall where a vast variety of whetstones and other types of sharpeners hung from pegs. Some were metal, others ceramic. All of the brands were proprietary enough not to reveal the composition on the packages. I scanned some more, my eyes stopping on a small package on the bottom row. Beneath clear plastic was a simple rectangular block of grayish-silver metal. It was called a fire starter and was made of magnesium. Excitement mounted as I read the instructions. To start a fire, one simply needed to scrape a knife on the surface of the magnesium and build a pile of shavings as small as the size of a quarter. Matches weren’t necessary, for the fire starter included a sparking insert for ignition.
I hurried back through the store with half a dozen of the magnesium starters in hand, and in my haste got tangled up in one section, then another. I wound through bowling balls and shoes, and baseball gloves, and ended up in swimming, where I was instantly captivated by a display of neon-colored swimming caps. One of them was hot pink. I thought of the residue found in Claire Rawley’s hair. I had believed from the start that she had been wearing something on her head when she was murdered, or at least when the fire reached her.
A shower cap had been considered but briefly, for its thin, plastic material wouldn’t have lasted five seconds in the heat. What had never entered my mind was a swimming cap, and as I quickly riffled through racks of them, I discovered that all were made of Lycra or latex or silicone.
The pink one was silicone, which I knew would hold up in extreme temperatures far better than the others. I purchased several of them. I drove back to my office and was lucky I didn’t get a ticket because I was passing people, no matter the lane. Images seized my mind, and they were too painful and horrific to entertain. This was one time I hoped my theory was wrong. I was speeding back to the labs because I had to know.
‘Oh Benton,’ I muttered as if he were near me. ‘Please don’t let this be so.’