pegged the trailer at about twenty feet long by eight feet wide. The stairs were down, and the hitch protruded up front. Instead of inspecting it on site, we could have hauled it to the crime lab, but that didn’t make any sense unless we found something. I stopped and got a better look at the brown leather recliner near the trailer door, its footrest hanging askew, barely attached on one side. The umbrella overhead had a slit at the back that appeared to be the result of the fabric rotting. Based on all that, I had little hope for the condition of the trailer inside.
Instead, I walked through the door into a well-kept interior. A small table with benches on one wall, a galley kitchen with pots neatly stacked by size on shelves over the stove, a cubbyhole bathroom that doubled as a shower with a drain in the center of the floor, and a bed at the far back, the sheets and quilt pushed to the side as if someone had just crawled out.
“Are we sure Carl lives here?” I asked. “It’s pretty neat.”
“Rather a surprise,” Max replied. “I wouldn’t have pegged Carl as a good housekeeper.”
A spick-and-span trailer, of course, wasn’t what we wanted. We needed the down and dirty; we were looking for evidence of four grisly murders and an attempted murder. We weren’t judging his housekeeping skills but his guilt or innocence. I caught a whiff of something. “Do you smell bleach?”
“I was just about to ask you the same question,” Max said. “What do you think prompted him to clean this morning, to get the place sparkling?”
“Mullins?” I said.
Max understood. I was suggesting that while Mullins was outside shouting, Carl could have been inside destroying evidence. I shook my head at the thought that if my lead detective had followed procedures, if he’d called in his hunch so we could join him, we might have gotten here in time to surprise Carl and preserve any evidence.
Skimming over the trailer’s insides, the place looked normal. A pair of cotton boxers lay on the unmade bed, as if Carl had thrown them there when he dressed that morning. Otherwise, nothing looked out of place. I saw a washing machine and a dryer behind a slatted door and swung it open. I put my hand on the outside of the dryer. It felt vaguely warm. I popped the door open and saw faded jeans and a white T-shirt, white athletic socks and white jockey shorts.
“Looks like he’s been washing clothes, too,” I said.
Max gave me a sideways grimace.
“Not to worry. They always miss something,” I said. As hard as folks try to get out stains, blood is hard to hide. It seeps into carpeting, splatters and spreads, drips down into pipes. I once had a case in Dallas where the guy even put new carpet in his living room, pad and all, and we found traces of his next-door neighbor’s blood on the cement underneath.
“You’ll take out the drains and look for blood residue in the sinks and the shower, right?” I asked Lieutenant Mueller, when he joined us inside. There was only enough room for the three of us, so his techs were searching the area surrounding the trailer. Mueller had the CSI unit’s base parked slightly up the hill.
“Of course,” Mueller said. “We’ll get right on it. What’s covered by the warrant? What can we take?”
“It’s pretty narrow. We’re looking for shoes that match that print in the kitchen, any bloody clothes,” Max said, handing him a copy. “Any kind of knife or gun. I know we found both at the ranch, and those are probably the murder weapons, but at this stage, before ballistics and the autopsies, we can’t be sure. Anything that looks like it may have blood on it or any possible murder weapon should be logged in.”
“Lieutenant Mueller,” I said, and he turned from Max toward me. “Also watch for anything that could be tied to the victims, Jacob and his family. It could help us with motive.”
“Got it,” Mueller said. “Now how about you two go outside and let my guys take over in here. We haven’t got a lot of room to work in.”
Max and I did as the lieutenant asked, and once we stepped outside the videographer took our place inside, intent on doing his job and recording the interior as we found it.
On the edge of the clearing, a few folks in the unit had set up