Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

or seven inches long like the hair Chandonne shed at his crime scenes. It is possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has been to this campground. “You manage this place by yourself?” Marino asks Kiffin.

“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 gonna get something out of my truck. Don’t touch nothing, all right?”

She watches us walk off. Marino and I talk in low voices. Hours before Chandonne appeared at my front door, Marino was out with the response team searching for him, and they discovered where he was hiding in Richmond in the mansion under major renovation on the James River, very close to my neighborhood. Since he rarely if ever went out during daylight hours, we assume, his comings and goings went undetected as he hid in the house and helped himself to whatever was there. Until this moment, it never occurred to any of us that Chan­donne might have stayed anyplace else.

“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 Chandonne drank while Berger was interview­ing him.

“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 Chan­donne’s claiming he drove one of those green motorcycles to clean Paris sidewalks, doubting the story but not much else any longer. We are back at the picnic table, and Marino sets down the toolbox and opens it. He gets out leather work gloves and puts them on, then shakes open several fifty-gallon heavy-duty garbage bags and I hold them open. We fill three bags, and he cuts open a fourth and drapes sections of black plastic over the baby carriage and tapes them together. While he is doing this, he explains to Kiffin that it is possible some­one scared off the family who was staying in this tent. He sug­gests that maybe a stranger claimed squatter’s rights at this site, even if for only a night. Did she at any point have a sense of anything out of the ordinary, including an unfamiliar veto- 27!

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