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“ROBBERY WAS THE MOTIVE for this?” Conklin shouted as Claire stepped into the den with her assistant in tow.  Before Claire could say, “Who died?” I reached out to her for a hug, said into her ear, “Conklin knew the victims.”

  “Gotcha,” she said.

  As Claire unpacked her scene kit, I told her about the manhandled corpse. Then I stepped out of her way as she took pictures of both bodies with her old Minolta, two shots from every angle.

  “There are two doors to this room,” she said as her camera flashed. “Chuck, you say that this room was the point of origin. But the victims stayed in here. Why was that?”

  “They could’ve been caught by surprise,” Hanni said. He was cutting samples from the carpet, putting fibers into K-packs.

  “If they were drinking and fell asleep, maybe a cigarette dropped down into the couch cushions.”

  Hanni explained what was still so hard to believe – that a fire could fill a room this size with smoke in less than a minute, that sleeping people could wake up coughing, be unable to see, get disoriented.

  Chuck said, “Someone says, ‘Let’s go this way.’ Other person says, ‘No, it’s this way.’ Maybe someone falls. Smoke inhalation gets them. Boom, they’re down, and they’re unconscious. These two people were dead inside a couple of minutes.”