Two minutes later, in a caravan of police SUVs and cruisers, the girls left the scene. Hiller waved Marnie into the trailer, where the cops had so far treaded lightly; an FBI forensics team from Santa Monica was still en route to process the place.
Inside, the cage held Marnie’s attention for a full ten seconds. Then her gaze fell on Harold Shannon, his eyes open and pointed at the ceiling, his brains and most of his blood soaking the carpet in a tacky puddle. The first responders had noted that the exit wounds suggested hollow points and that the shooter must have taken the shell casings. So much for ballistics evidence—fragmented scraps of bullets weren’t going to tell them anything.
Hiller was standing at the mouth of a hallway leading off to the trailer’s back rooms.
“You got a strong stomach?” he asked.
“I’ve seen worse corpses,” Marnie said.
“I wasn’t talking about the body.” Hiller nodded behind himself, down the hall. “There’s something back here I guess you’ll need to see. Or … know about, anyway.”
She wondered at the odd choice of words but followed him as he led the way out of the living room.
There were only two rooms off the hall: a tiny bathroom, and then Shannon’s bedroom.
There was nothing special about the bathroom, beyond that it was filthy. Marnie gave it a glance and continued along the hall. She found Hiller standing just inside the doorway to the bedroom, yet keeping his gaze pointed back into the hallway. He didn’t want to look at the room. Marnie stepped past him and saw why.
The furniture was basic enough: a bed and a nightstand, both about as disgusting as the rest of the trailer. The bedsheets appeared to have never been washed. The nightstand was covered with beer bottles full of cigarette butts, and paper plates and bowls caked with rotted food scraps. There was a single window, with dark green curtains pulled over it. There was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Marnie saw all those things and forgot them in the same half second, as she took in the reason Hiller had his eyes pointed away from the room.
The space was wallpapered with photographs. Digital shots, home printed on 8?"-by-11" sheets of high-gloss paper. The pictures were lined up on the walls in a grid that covered them floor to ceiling, corner to corner. Their edges met with absurd precision, though not a scrap of tape was visible anywhere. Maybe the paper sheets were spray-glued to the wall. A labor of obsession.
Marnie realized she was keeping her viewpoint moving. Unwilling to let it stop on any single image. All the same, she saw them. Saw what they were. After a few seconds she blinked and aimed her gaze at the doorway. Hiller was still standing there. Marnie could hear his breath hissing in and out through his teeth.
Her own breathing stayed quiet, but she could feel her hands wanting to shake.
*
When she stepped back out onto the porch she saw an uplink truck for ABC7 News parked at the edge of the scene. No sign yet of the forensics team.
She walked to her car, then went past it into the darkness, away from all the eyes. A hundred yards west of the trailer she came upon an arroyo channel—almost walked into it, in the trace light. The thing was strewn with garbage and broken machinery. She sat on its edge, her gaze fixed on the horizon, and let the tremors in her hands set in.
She was still sitting there five minutes later when headlights topped a rise to the west, her team rolling in at last. She squinted and turned away—her eyes had adjusted to the darkness—and found herself staring at the arroyo’s edge beside her.
Where she could just make out what she’d been unable to see a few minutes before: scuff marks and scrapes from hands and shoes. Like someone had landed on all fours here, maybe after vaulting over the arroyo. Or out of it.
Marnie took a miniflashlight from her pocket and switched it on. She studied the scour marks on the desert hardpan, then swung the beam to the far side of the arroyo. Nothing particular jumped out at her over there, but in the beam’s peripheral light something else did.
A scrap of fabric, caught on jagged metal in the arroyo’s depth.
She shone the light down onto it. It was a torn piece of denim, hanging from the spearlike point of a broken axle.
In almost the same moment, something closer drew Marnie’s attention. She adjusted the light again and blinked in surprise.
Three feet below her, an old washing machine lay half-submerged in the arroyo’s dirt wall. Along the nearest edge of the washer were two shapes stamped with desert dust: the impressions of a pair of shoe soles, from the balls of the feet forward.
And maybe something else.
Marnie lit up the channel’s wall beneath her, dug one of her feet into it, and slid carefully down to the washing machine. She crouched over the thing, putting the flashlight and her eyes three inches from the shoe impressions.
They were flanked by handprints, just visible in the light glare. Eight fingers, pressed to the metal. Eight fingerprints.