“Oh, ’round three.” She is just inside the doorway, staring blankly at the clock. “Looks like he came in and unplugged the clock and the lamp, now doesn’t it? That’s kind of strange, unless maybe he was plugging something else in and needed the outlet. Some of these business types have those laptop computers.”
“Did you notice if he had one?” Marino glances at her.
“I didn’t notice he had anything except what looked like a car key and his wallet.”
“You didn’t say nothing about a wallet. You saw a wallet?”
“Pulled it out to pay me. Black leather, as I recall. Expensive looking, like everything else he had. Might have been alligator or something,” she adds to her story.
“How much cash he pay you and in what kind of bills?”
“A hundred-dollar bill and four twenties. He told me to keep the change. The total was one hundred and sixty dollars and seventy cents.”
“Oh yeah. The sixteen-oh-seven special,” Marino says in a monotone. He doesn’t like Kiffin. He certainly doesn’t trust her worth a damn, but he keeps it to himself, playing her like a hand of cards. If I didn’t know him so well, he might fool even me.
“You got some kind of stepladder around here?” Marino says next.
She hesitates. “Well, I guess so.” She is gone again, the door left standing wide open.
Marino gets down to take a closer look at the outlet and unplugged cords. “You think they plugged the heat gun in here?” He ponders this out loud.
“It’s possible, //”we’re talking about a heat gun,” I remind him.
“I’ve used them to thaw my pipes and to get ice off my front steps. Works like a charm.” He is looking under the bed with the flashlight. “Never had a case where one was used on a person. Jesus. He must’ve been gagged pretty good for no one to hear anything. Wonder why they unplugged both things, the lamp and the clock?”
“Maybe so it didn’t throw the circuit breaker?”
“In a joint like this, yeah, maybe. A heat gun’s probably about the same voltage as a blow-dryer. One-twenty, one-
twenty-five. And a blow-dryer would probably knock out the
lights in a dump like this.”
I move over to the dresser and look at the Bible. It is open to the sixth and seventh chapters of Ecclesiastes, and the ex- posed pages are sooty, the area of dresser under the Bible spared, indicating this was the position the Bible was in when the fire started. The question is whether the Bible was open like this before the victim checked in, or does it even belong with the room, for that matter? My eyes wander down lines and stop at the first verse of the seventh chapter. A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth. I read it to Marino. I tell him that this section of Ecclesiastes is about vanity.
“Kind of fits with the queer thing, don’t it?” he comments as aluminum scrapes outside and Kiffin returns with a rush of wintry air. Marino takes a paint-spattered, bent ladder from her and opens the legs. He climbs up and shines the flashlight on the bolts. “Damn, I think I need new glasses. I can’t see nothing,” he says as I hold the ladder steady.
“Want me to look?” I offer.
“Help yourself.” He climbs back down.
I take a small magnifying lens from my satchel and up I go. He hands me the light and I examine the eyebolts. I can’t see any fibers. If there are any, we are not going to have any luck collecting them here. The problem is how to preserve one type of evidence without ruining another, and there are three possible types of evidence that might be associated with the eyebolts: fingerprints, fibers and tool marks. If we dust off soot to look for latents, we might lose fibers that could match the ligature that might have been threaded through the eye-bolts, which we also can’t unscrew without risking the introduction of new tool marks, assuming we use a tool such as pliers. The biggest threat is inadvertently eradicating any possible prints. In fact, the conditions and lighting are so bad that we shouldn’t be examining anything here, really. I get an idea. “If you can hand me a couple baggies,” I tell Marino. “And tape.”