"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!
cle in the area prior to last Saturday? He poses all this as if it would never occur to him that she would tarnish the truth.
We know, of course, that Chandonne could not have been here after Saturday. He has been in custody since then. Kiffin is no help. She claims she was aware of nothing out of the ordinary except that early one morning she went out for firewood and noticed the tent was gone but the family's belongings were still here, or at least part of them. She can't swear to it, but the more Marino prods her, the more she believes she noticed the tent gone around eight A.M., last Friday. Chandonne murdered Diane Bray on Thursday night. Did he then flee afterward to James City County to hide? I imagine him appearing at the tent, a couple and their small children inside. One look at him and it is believable they would have jumped into their car and sped off without bothering to pack.
We carry the trash bags to Marino's truck and put them in back. Again, Kiffin awaits our return, hands in the pockets of her jacket, her face rosy from the cold. The motel is straight ahead through pine trees, a small, boxy white structure, two stories with doors painted the color of evergreens. Behind the motel are more woods, then a wide creek that branches off from the James River.
"How many people you got staying here right now?" Marino asks the woman who runs this dreadful tourist trap.
"Right now? Maybe thirteen, depending on whether anybody else's checked out. Lot of people just leave their key in the room and I don't know they're gone until I go in to clean up. You know, I left my cigarettes in the house," she says to Marino without looking at him. "You mind?"
Marino sets down his toolbox on the path. He shakes a cigarette loose from the pack and lights it for her. Her upper lip crinkles like crepe paper when she sucks in smoke, inhaling deeply and blowing out one side of her mouth. My lust for tobacco stirs. My fractured elbow complains about the cold. I
can't stop thinking about the family in the tent and their terror_if it is true that Chandonne showed up and the family exists. If he did come directly here after murdering Bray, what happened to his clothes? He had to have gotten blood all over himself. Did he leave Bray's house and come out here covered with blood and frighten strangers out of their tent, and no one called the police or said a word to anyone?
"How many people were staying here night before last, when the fire started?" Marino picks up his toolbox and we start walking again.
"I know how many were checked in." She is vague. "Don't know who was still here. Eleven had checked in, including him."
"Including the man who died in the fire?" It is my turn to ask questions.
Kiffin throws a look at me. "That's right."
'Tell me about his checking in," Marino says to her as we walk and pause to look around, and then walk on. "You see him drive up like we just did? Appears to me cars just pull right up to the front of your house."
She starts shaking her head. "No sir. Didn't see no car. There was a knock on the door and I opened it. Told him to go next door to the office and I'd meet him there. He was a nice-looking man, well-dressed, didn't look like the usual I get, that much stands out clear as day."
"He tell you his name?" Marino asks her.
"Paid cash."
"So if someone pays cash, you don't get them to fill out nothing."
"Can if they want. Don't have to. I have a registration pad you can fill out and then I tear off the receipt. He said he didn't need a receipt."
"He have an accent or anything?"
"He didn't sound like he was from these parts."
"Could you place where he sounded from? Northern? Maybe foreign?" Marino keeps on as we pause again beneath pines.
She looks around, thinking and smoking as we follow her along a muddy path that leads to the motel parking lot. "Not deep South," she decides. "But he didn't sound like he was from a foreign country. You know, he didn't say much. Said as little as he had to. I got a feeling, you know, like he was in a hurry and sort of nervous, and he sure wasn't chatty." This sounds completely fabricated. Her tone of voice actually changes.
"Anybody staying in these campers?" Marino then asks.
"I rent 'em out. People don't come with their own campers right now. It's off-season for camping."
"Anybody renting them now?"
"No. Nobody."
In front of the motel, a chair with ripped upholstery has been placed near a Coke machine and pay phone. There are several cars in the lot, American-made, not new. A Granada, an LTD, a Firebird. There is no sign of whoever might own them.
"Who do you get this time of year?" I inquire.
"A mixture," Kiffin goes on as we cross the parking lot to the south end of the building.
I scan wet asphalt.
"Folks who aren't getting along. That's a lot of it this time of year. People fussing and one or the other walks out or gets kicked out and needs a place to stay. Or people driving a long distance to visit family and need a place for the night. Or when the river floods like it did a couple months back, some people come here because I allow pets. And I get tourists."
"People seeing Williamsburg and Jamestown?" I ask.
"A fair number of people here to see Jamestown. That's picked up quite a bit since they started digging up the graves out there. Funny how people are."
Chapter 22
ROOM FOURTEEN IS ON THE FIRST LEVEL AT THE very end. Crime scene tape is a bright yellow ribbon across the door. The location is remote, at the edge of thick woods that buffer the motel from Route 5.
I am especially interested in any vegetation or debris that might be on the asphalt directly in front of the room, where rescuers would have dragged the body. I note dirt and bits of dead leaves and cigarette butts. I am wondering if the fragment of candy bar wrapper I found adhering to the dead man's back came from inside the room or from out here in the parking lot. If it came from inside the room, that could mean the killer tracked it in, or it could mean that the killer walked through or close to the abandoned campsite at some point prior to the murder, unless the bit of paper had been inside the room for a while, perhaps tracked in by Kiffin herself when she came in to clean after the last guest checked out. Evidence is tricky. You always have to consider its origin and not draw conclusions based on where the evidence ended up. Fibers on a body, for example, might have been transferred from the