He said, "Oh," and definitely sounded relieved.

Someone had recently started a dryer in this house. How long did a load take to dry? Forty-five minutes? An hour?

Through the side windows she watched another black-and-white slide to a stop at the curb.

She stepped around the lamp on the floor so that she could see behind the sofa at the far end of the room. Behind the sofa was an open door. She thought it would lead back to the family room that she'd seen when she first came into the house, the one adjacent to the new kitchen. She swung the beam toward the floor behind the striped couch.

She saw the foot, paused, and then she took another step.

"Oh Jesus. Oh my God. Oh dear Jesus." If she had a free hand she would have crossed herself with it, an affectation of her Catholic past.

At the sight of the blood and the mangled tissue where the person's face should be, VanHorn felt a sour geyser erupting in her esophagus and she swallowed twice to stem the urge to vomit. She took a step back and stumbled over the broken pottery. When she returned her gaze to the body on the floor, she said, "May God rest your soul, whoever you are."

Carpino said, "What?" His voice came from behind her, maybe ten or twelve feet away.

She said, "You were right, there's a body in here, Colin. A lot of blood. Call for an ambulance, okay?"

She counted to three and told herself she was fine. But she didn't feel fine. She felt as though she should sit down to keep from passing out, but she didn't want to disturb what she already knew was a crime scene. Sequentially, she looked everywhere in the room that didn't have a bloody body. She even looked at the ceiling. For her, the act was like looking at the horizon when she was seasick. Finally, the wave of nausea eased and her neurons resumed firing and she carefully checked the room to make triple-sure she and her partner and the guy on the floor didn't have any company.

She dropped to her knees, stooped over the body, and lowered her head to listen for breath sounds. She heard nothing. To feel for a pulse, she needed to put down either her light or her gun. For a moment she weighed her choice, finally deciding to place the torch on the carpet, and, as she'd been taught, she rested three fingers on the underside of the radial bone of the man's right wrist. She was thinking the body was that of a man. The socks were men's socks. She was pretty sure of that. An exposed inch of calf was moderately hairy.

It was a man.

She felt no pulse. She thought, maybe, the body was cooler than it should have been, but only a little, and certainly not cold. She spent a moment trying to remember the speed at which a body gives up its warmth after death-a degree an hour, was that it?-and wondered if it was possible that this man was the same person who had started the dryer upstairs. He couldn't have cooled down that fast, could he? Maybe her own fingers were hot and that's why the body felt cool. That was certainly possible.

Variables, variables.

Bruce Collamore had said he heard the "somebody's-killing-me" scream at 9:51. She looked at her watch. It was 10:17. No, if this were the screamer, he wouldn't have cooled down, yet.

Hot fingers. Had to be her hot fingers.

Still on her knees, she lifted her Mag-Lite again and simultaneously turned her body to address her partner. The beam of the light danced carelessly off the ceiling and the walls. She said, "This guy's dead, and there's a lot of blood. Call for detectives and have the backup team tape off a perimeter out there. Make it a big perimeter. Tell the tall guy with the dog that he's not going anywhere for a while. We have to do the rest of the house. Get some people in here to help out. Tell them to come in the back door and walk straight to the front of the house, then turn left to the living room. And remind them not to touch anything. We have a crime scene and I don't want to be the one to mess it up."

She said a silent prayer and aimed her lamp directly at the body on the floor, trying to discern the details of the man's face through the severe damage and the copious blood.

For a second or two she thought she knew the man and tried to jar an association loose from her memory. It didn't work. VanHorn then decided that she didn't really know him. Again, she repeated her silent prayer and wondered what in heaven God had been thinking at 9:51 that evening.

She decided that He must have been seriously distracted.

The first pair of detectives arrived about twenty minutes before midnight to find a well-delineated perimeter and a crime scene that was barely contaminated. Sam Purdy, the senior detective, was ecstatic. But he kept his joy to himself.

"Who was first officer?" he asked of the patrol cop who was manning the clipboard and controlling access to the scene.

"VanHorn and Carpino."

"RP?" Purdy was asking who had called in the crime-who was the reporting party.

"Still here."

"Wits?"

"Got one, guy named Bruce Collamore. He's the RP, too. That's him sitting in the backseat of my squad. Has a dog with him. Heard a scream a shade before ten. I talked to him a little bit-he's an interesting guy, teaches high school now, math I think. But he played a little pro football when he was younger, if you can believe it."

Purdy grunted. "That's it? That's all you know?"

The officer shrugged. "The Bengals. He was in camp for a few days with the Bengals."

"I should care where he played football?"

"Hey, it's early, Detective. We didn't want to mess with him before you guys got here. Played tight end, if you really want to know. Isn't built like a tight end now, though; he's tall enough, but he's too skinny, more like a Randy Moss type. He's crammed into the back of the squad like an anchovy in a can."

Purdy said, "I might give a shit about any of this if he played for the Vikings, but I certainly don't care about some guy who didn't last a week with the damn Bengals, that's for sure. Whose house is this?"

"Neighbor says it's a family named Peters, but the neighbor didn't hear anything that came down."

Purdy turned to his partner. "You get that? What else do we have, Luce?"

Lucy Tanner looked at her notepad. She knew he was asking her if the detective's log was current. In these circumstances, it was her job to make sure it was. She said, "We were called by dispatch via pager at ten twenty-six, arrive at the scene on Jay Street at eleven thirty-five. Six patrol officers present, all have checked in with the control officer. Medical personnel have come and gone. Photographers present and waiting for clearance to go inside. Ditto CSIs. Weather? Clear skies, temp near fifty. One wit at the scene, already isolated. Search warrant has been requested from Judge Silverman. We're waiting on it."

"You get snaps? I want a good set of snaps. Who knows what time the photographers will get to go in."

Lucy held up a disposable camera with a built-in flash. "This side of the house is covered."

"Let's go to the back, then."

Kerry VanHorn walked across the front yard of the house, approaching the two detectives. She was squinting. "Detective? I'm Officer VanHorn. I was first officer on the scene, along with Officer Carpino."

"Sam Purdy. This is Lucy Tanner. Where's Carpino?" Purdy thought he recognized VanHorn from a recent altercation he'd investigated between a bicyclist and a pedestrian on Canyon Boulevard. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard of Carpino, didn't think he'd been with VanHorn that day.

VanHorn nodded a greeting to Lucy before she answered. "We entered the home through an open rear door. He's standing watch there."

"Who's been inside?"

"Just Carpino and me initially. After we found the deceased on the main level, two other officers accompanied us on a search of the rest of the premises. Upon further search, we found a disabled person sleeping upstairs in the master bedroom. When we couldn't arouse her enough to take a statement, we called an ambulance. Two paramedics entered the house and removed her. At my request, one of them walked through the section of the house where I found the deceased to confirm that he was, well, deceased. The ambulance left about twenty-five minutes ago. The disabled woman is now at Community Hospital. You may want to dispatch someone to get her statement, Detective. She was not particularly coherent when I tried to talk with her."