“I’m going to need you to wait outside,” Marino says to Kiffin.
The only light is what spills through the open doorway, and I make out the shape of the double bed. In the center of it is a crater where the mattress burned down to the bed springs. Marino turns on a flashlight and a long finger of light moves through the room, starting with the closet just right of where I am Standing near the doorway. Two bent wire hangers dangle from the wooden rod. The bathroom is just left of the door, and against the wall opposite the bed is a dresser. Something is on top of the dresser, a book. It is open. Marino walks closer to illuminate the pages. “Gideon Bible,” he says.
The light moves on to the far end of the room, where there are two chairs and a small table before a window and a back door. Marino opens the curtains and wan sunlight seeps into the room. The only fire damage I can see is to the bed, which smoldered and produced a lot of dense smoke. Everything inside the room is covered with soot, and this is an unexpected forensic gift. “The entire room’s been smoked,” I marvel out loud.
“Huh?” Marino shines the light around as I dig out my portable phone. I see no evidence that Stanfield tried looking for latent prints in here, not that I blame him. Most investigators would assume the intense soot and smoke damage would obliterate fingerprints, when in fact, the opposite is true. Heat and soot tend to process latent prints, and there is an old laboratory method called smoking used on nonporous objects such as shiny metals, which tend to have a Teflon effect when traditional dusting powders are applied. Latent prints are actually transferred to an object because the friction ridge surfaces of fingers and palms have oily residues on them. It is these residues that end up on some surface: a doorknob, a drinking glass, a window pane. Heat softens the residues, and smoke and soot then adhere to them. During cooling the residues become fixed or firm and the soot can be gently brushed away like dusting powder. Before Super Glue fuming and alternate light sources, it was not uncommon to conjure up prints by burning tarry pine chips, camphor and magnesium. It is very possible that beneath the patina of soot in this room there is a galaxy of latent fingerprints that have already been processed for us.
I call fingerprints section chief Neils Vander at home and explain the situation, and he says he will meet us at the motel
in two hours. Marino is caught up in other preoccupations, his
attention fixated on some spot above the bed, where he is shining the light. “Holy shit,” he mutters. “Doc, would you look at this?” He illuminates two sooty eyebolts screwed into the dry wall ceiling about three feet apart. “Hey!” he calls through the doorway to Kiffin.
She peers inside the room and looks where he shines the light.
“You got any idea why these bolts are in the ceiling?” he asks her.
She gets a strange expression on her face, her voice going up a note, the way it does when she is being evasive, I think. “Never seen them before. Now I wonder how that happened?” she declares.
“Last time you were in this room was when?” Marino asks her.
“A couple days before he checked in. When I cleaned it after the last person checked out, the last person before him, I mean.”
“The bolts weren’t here then?”
“I didn’t notice, if they were.”
“Mrs. Kiffin, you just hang outside there in case we got more questions.”
Marino and I put on gloves. He splays his fingers, rubber stretching and snapping. The window next to the back door overlooks a swimming pool that is filled with dirty water. Across from the bed is a small Zenith television on a stand, a note taped to it reminding guests to turn the TV off before they go out. The room is rather much what Stanfield described, but he did not mention the Gideon Bible open on the dresser, or that to the right of the bed near the floor there is an electrical outlet with two unplugged cords on the carpet next to it, one to the lamp on the bedside table, the other to the clock radio. The clock radio is old. It isn’t digital. When it was unplugged, the hands stopped at 3:12 P.M. Marino tells Kiffin to step inside the room again. “What time did you say he checked in?” he asks.