“I don’t want problems out here,” she lets us know. “As if I don’t have enough going on, especially this time of year,” she says as she walks. “All these people pulling in here morning, noon and night to gawk and take pictures.”
“What people?” Marino asks her.
“Just people in cars, pulling up in the drive, staring. Some of them getting out and roaming around. Last night I woke up when someone drove through. It was two A.M.”
Marino lights a cigarette. We follow Kiffin through the shade of pines along an overgrown path of churned-up snow, past old campers that list like unseaworthy ships. Near a picnic table is a nest of personal belongings that at first glance look like trash from a campsite someone didn’t clean up. But then I see the unexpected: an odd collection of toys, dolls, paperback books, sheets, two pillows, a blanket, a double baby carriageitems that are soggy and dirty not because they were worthless and deliberately pitched but because they have been inadvertently exposed to the elements. Scattered throughout are shredded plastic wrappers that instantly connect with the fragment I found clinging to the first victim’s burned back. The fragments are white, blue and bright orange and are ripped in narrow strips, as if whoever did it has a nervous habit of picking things to pieces.
“Someone sure left in a hurry,” Marino comments.
Kiffin is watching me.
“Maybe skipped without settling the bill?” Marino says.
“Oh no.” She seems in a hurry to move on to the small tawdry motel showing through trees ahead. “They paid up front like everyone else. A family with two little ones staying in a tent and all of a sudden they hightailed it out of here. Don’t know why they left all that. Some of it, like the baby buggy’s pretty nice. Course, then it snowed on everything.”
A gust of wind scatters several bits of wrappers like con- fetti. I wander closer and nudge a pillow with my foot, turning it over. A pungent, sour odor rises to my nostrils as I squat and take a closer look. Clinging to the underside of the pillow is hairlong, pale hair, very fine hair mat has no pigmentation. My heart thuds like the sudden, unexpected kick of a bass drum. I move the shredded wrappers around with my finger. The plasticized material is pliable but tough, so it doesn’t tear easily unless you start at a crinkled edge where the wrapper was heat-sealed together. Some of the fragments are large and easily recognizable as having come from PayDay peanut-caramel candy bars. I can even make out the website address for Hershey’s Chocolate. More hair on the blanket, short, dark hair, a pubic hair. And several more of the long, pale hairs.
“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