“The key’s under the floor mat,” Red said. “Do you want me to disconnect it from the charger?”
“No need,” Marvin said. “We won’t have to start it.”
“All right,” he said, “but be prepared. After it’s been locked up for a while, the smell of bleach will knock your socks off.”
Marvin and I both stopped short, but he was the one who spoke first. “Bleach?” he asked.
Red nodded. “Shelley told Nate that a friend of hers borrowed the car to go fishing and ended up spilling a bucket of fish bait in the luggage compartment. He tried to clean it up, but the smell of dead fish is tough as hell to get rid of.”
So’s blood, I thought.
I was afraid Red was going to hang around and dog our heels the whole time, but instead he turned and went back inside. Marvin handed me a small video camera. “You ever used one of these?”
“Once or twice,” I said.
“You’re on camera duty, then,” he told me. “We need to start by time-dating this. Go ahead and start filming.”
I would have preferred using the video option on my phone, but that’s just me. Rules are rules. It took some fumbling around before I managed to get the damned camera up and running. Finally Marvin was able to begin the narration. “The time is four fifteen p.m., Sunday, December sixteenth, 2018. The location is 4041 Ocean Drive Loop, Homer, Alaska. Present is Lieutenant Marvin Price of the Homer PD investigations unit. With me is a private investigator named J. P. Beaumont of Seattle, Washington. We’re about to make entry into a vehicle belonging to Nathaniel Bucknell housed in a garage at the residence of Grover Bolger in Homer, Alaska. Both men have given their verbal consent for us to search this vehicle on suspicion that it might have been involved in a possible homicide.”
Marvin paused for a moment and then nodded in my direction. “Okay,” he added. “Here goes.”
Saying that, he walked over to where the garage door’s electrical cord was connected to an outlet. The moment he pulled the plug, we were plunged into total darkness. Marvin managed to stumble his way back to the rear of the Subaru, where he located the latch and punched the button.
Alternate light-source implements need total darkness in order to function. Had the vehicle’s interior lights come on, we would have been screwed, but thankfully, due either to age or some missing connection, they didn’t. By the time the tailgate swung open, my eyes had adjusted enough that I could just make out a dim image of Marvin’s hand holding the spray bottle as it suddenly appeared in the camera’s viewfinder.
At that point I was holding my breath, and Marvin probably was holding his, too. It felt a little bit like standing on a bouncing diving board for the first time and knowing you’re about to plunge into the deep end. The moment Marvin hit the spray button, the carpet on the interior of that old Subaru lit up like a damned Christmas tree, and it sure as hell wasn’t caused by fish blood!
“Holy crap!” I exclaimed aloud without meaning to. “She really did do it!”
In that instant I knew it, and Marvin knew it, but nobody else did, and it would take a whole lot more evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Marvin immediately stopped spraying. If these bloodstains belonged to Chris Danielson, they were more than twelve years old, and we didn’t want to do anything that would degrade them further in case there was a chance that a DNA profile could still be obtained from the sample.
“Due to the visible presence of a substantial amount of blood,” Marvin continued for the benefit of the recording, “this vehicle will immediately be towed to the Homer PD impound lot for further processing. Video filming is ceasing at four twenty p.m.”
I turned off the camera, Marvin plugged the garage door’s electrical cord back into the wall outlet, and then he and I exchanged high fives. Harriet Raines had given me the gift of a weekend to conclude my own investigation. With Marvin Price’s help, I’d done just that, but he and I both knew that we were a long way from being able to say case closed.
Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath I was shuttled off to the sidelines while Marvin summoned additional officers and proceeded to cross the necessary t’s and dot the i’s, a process I knew would most likely keep him occupied for the next several hours. After he’d called for a tow truck, Marvin’s next order of business was a call to Nate Bucknell in Palm Desert. I could tell from Marvin’s side of the conversation that Nate was dismayed to learn that in his absence his vehicle had just been declared a crime scene and was about to be impounded.