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investigating his wife's disappearance.
    Returning to his inspection, Brocchini saw the camouflage jacket Scott said he'd been wearing on his supposedly rainy fishing trip. The jacket was dry to the touch. A sports bag nearby contained two fishing lures, still in their package, and a store receipt. Two other sacks from shops in a nearby mall contained clothing, along with purchase slips dated several weeks earlier. In the glove box was the Llama .22-caliber handgun Scott had mentioned, loaded with a magazine of live ammo. There was no round in the chamber.
    Without hesitation, Brocchini collected the pistol and marked it as evidence.
    Shifting his focus to Laci's vehicle, a 1996 Land Rover Discovery, he saw a cell phone on the front seat still plugged into the dashboard. He tried to turn it on, but it flickered and immediately switched off. The phone's battery was dead.
    As the two men stood in the driveway, Laci's mother was over on the front lawn watching. She had barely glimpsed Scott since their brief meeting in the park more than four hours ago. Now she tried to catch his eye again, but he still seemed to be avoiding her. Sharon thought his behavior was out of character but put it out of her mind when she realized that she'd never seen him under such stress.
    The waiting was physically and emotionally exhausting, and Sharon finally sat down on the curb to rest. By that time, five marked police cars lined the street, and the number of people on the scene was increasing. Officers in navy blue uniforms and the investigation team in jeans and sneakers joined the detectives already on-site. Her friend Sandy was with her when Scott finally walked over.
    "You know, if they find blood anywhere that doesn't mean anything," Scott told his mother-in-law. "I'm a sportsman. Just look at my hands. I could drop blood anywhere."
    Sharon was too upset for the strange statement to register, but the exchange bothered Sandy, and later she reported it to the police. When I first heard this story, I wondered if Scott was simply taking a page out of O. J. Simpson's playbook. When questioned about blood drops appearing in his Bronco and on the walkway to his home, Simpson deftly explained that he had cut his knuckle twice-once before he left on his "alibi" trip to Chicago, and a second time on a glass in the Chicago hotel room when he was told about Nicole's death. He later revised this by saying he cut himself all the time.
    As an avid equestrienne, I have four horses and six dogs; I'm always scuffing myself playing with the puppies or working in the barn-or, even more hazardous, while cooking in the kitchen. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine trying to convince anyone that major droplets of blood can be found around my home on a regular basis, as Scott did.
    Just before 11:00 P.M., Detective Brocchini suggested that Laci's mother go home for the night. Then he turned to Scott. "Is it all right if the ID Tech people go inside to take photographs and collect evidence?" Taking crime scene photos and gathering evidence a few hours into a missing persons case is quite unusual, but Brocchini was following his instinct. He wanted the scene preserved as quickly as possible.
    "That would be fine," Scott replied.
    At 11:17, Brocchini and Evers drove Scott to his place of business, exactly four miles away. Scott sat in the passenger seat of the detective's unmarked sedan; Evers followed closely behind in a patrol car. Scott was a fertilizer salesman for Tradecorp, a company headquartered in Spain. His territory spanned
California
,
Arizona
, and
New Mexico
, but the base of operations was a one-story warehouse in an industrial area of Modesto, at
1027 North Emerald Avenue
.
    Just as they had searched the Petersons' home, the detectives intended to scrutinize Scott's place of business. They were particularly interested in the boat he had taken on his afternoon fishing expedition, a fourteen-foot aluminum Sears Gamefisher stored inside his warehouse.
    The