“It’s a rappelling rope,” Alex said as he briefly studied the uppermost knot, a figure eight.

“You think a rock climber did this?” Ciara asked.

Alex hesitated. “Could be.”

“Maybe a sailor,” Marquez said.

“Alex is a climber,” Ciara said. “He knows a rappelling rope when he sees one.”

Marquez looked at Alex, but Alex was looking up at the place where the rope disappeared into the ceiling. “Rope goes up over a beam,” Marquez said. “Wraps around it a few times. The access to the attic is just outside this room, in the hall. I took a look, thinking there might be prints in the dust, but the attic has been vacuumed between here and the access.”

“Vacuumed?” Ciara said in disbelief.

“Yes, vacuumed,” Marquez said. “This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment killing.”

“No shit,” she said. “Brilliant observation.”

Marquez sighed in exasperation, then turned to Brandon and said, “I’ll be out front if you need me, Alex.”

“Nice going, Ciara,” Alex said when Marquez was out of earshot.

“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke.”

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “I could use some air.”

Lakewood, California

Sunday, May 18, 10:08 P.M.

He walked toward the back of the house, wondering if she would follow him. He figured he had a fifty-fifty chance of being ignored. But he heard her footsteps behind him. The back door was open, and he went out without touching it, even though the lab had already dusted for prints. This had been the point of entry, they had been told. A piece of cake for anyone with even the most basic burglary skills.

He saw that no one was in the yard, stepped out into the center of it, and took a deep breath. It would take a while to stop smelling the sour blood smell, but he was glad to be out of the close quarters of the bathroom. And although the evening was warm, it felt twenty degrees cooler outside.

He thought for a moment about killers who tortured their victims, who swept up-no, vacuumed-and generally left crime scenes too clean. He didn’t like any of it, hated what his experience told him-this wasn’t a one-time foray into murder. This was the work of a planner. What else had been planned? Already completed?

The climbing rope. That especially disturbed him. He wondered if it disturbed him because he had a climber’s regard for such a rope, or if he was not paying enough attention to his gut instinct. This scene had immediately reminded him of another, long-ago series of murders.

He cut off that line of thinking. Impossible that it was the same killer.

He turned to look at Ciara. She held her chin up, and in the wash of moonlight on her face, he could see the defiant set of her mouth. Her arms were crossed over her chest. She was tall and dark-haired, in her mid-forties-six or seven years older than he, but with less time in the department.

He thought again of J.D., who had been dead for almost a year now. What a contrast this new partner made to that old man.

Then again, he supposed, by appearance Alex and J.D. themselves could hardly have been more different. When they had first teamed up twelve years ago, Alex-with only seven years in the department-had been the youngest of the one hundred and ten detectives in the LASD Homicide Bureau. J.D. was one of the oldest.

J.D. was an overweight, chain-smoking, hard-drinking black man who had grown up in Compton. His nose had been broken at least twice, and a thick scar gave an odd bend to the end of his left eyebrow. He had been the first person in his family to go to college. He hated heights.

Alex was muscular and athletic, blue-eyed and white. He worked out almost daily, had never smoked, and drank little. He was the first person in the Brandon family to attend what his brother called “a mere state university”-rather than an Ivy League school, or USC, or Stanford. He had spent most of his childhood in Malibu and Bel Air, and loved rock climbing. For a brief time, some of the other detectives had referred to the team as “J.D. and G.Q.” Somehow J.D. had put a stop to that. Probably, Alex thought, with a single look.

Whatever their apparent differences, they were a solid team. Alex’s uncle, a longtime member of the department-his inspiration for joining it-had taught him a great deal about law enforcement, but J.D. took that education to another level.

J.D.’s coolheaded, deceptively easygoing approach appealed to Alex. Walking into the midst of a horrific crime scene, J.D. would light up a cigarette and say, “Let’s not get excited.” Calmly, he’d put the pieces together as only he could. He would sit down in an interrogation room with the most hardened killer, look him straight in the eye, and say, with seeming sincerity, “I understand completely why you did it. Let’s talk.” He had obtained more confessions than anyone else in the department, and never by using anything but his presence, his mind-and something he called “the knack.”

He was brilliant in almost every way except in his care of himself. He had died of a massive coronary. Alex had wept more at J.D.’s funeral than he had at his own father’s. And gone back to work with a vengeance.

Ciara was the only detective in Homicide who had a clearance rate anywhere near Alex’s own. About sixty-eight percent of her cases had been cleared to the point of highly probable suspects named or in custody. For someone as new to Detectives as she was, that was incredible.

He had to admit being impressed by that-he had been in the homicide bureau much longer than Ciara, but she obviously had the knack, too.

Three months ago, his captain had asked him to take her on as a partner, and he had agreed. Every now and then, he saw how much it bothered her to answer to someone younger, but even though they had their ups and downs, for the most part, they got along fine. He just wished she’d learn the proverb about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. He was her last chance, after all-Alex was the only person in Homicide who was willing to be her partner. Behind her back, most of the others referred to her as B.B. Queen. The B.B. stood for Ball Buster.

The few other women in the homicide bureau liked her less than the men did.

Watching her now, he thought dispassionately that she was the kind of woman more likely to be described as handsome than pretty. She worked hard to keep in shape, and even her worst enemies among the males in the homicide bureau eyed her with appreciation when she walked down the halls. Thinking of them, he said, “You tired of working with me?”

“How can you even ask such a stupid question?”

“Marquez goes back and tells the captain what you said in there within earshot of a coroner’s assistant and a lab tech, what do you think is going to happen?”

“The captain’s not going to transfer me out of Homicide. My clearance rate is too high,” she said, but her voice betrayed her lack of certainty.

He stayed silent. She knew as well as he did that success in closing cases might not be enough to keep her from being transferred.

“Aw, come on, Alex. I’ll go out and apologize to Marquez on the front lawn at the top of my lungs if you want me to.”

“No, let him cool off. And aim for something less dramatic and more sincere.”

“You could be right. Maybe after he hangs out there with that puking kid for a while, I won’t look so bad.”

“I feel sorry for that rookie. Lab tech really chewed him out.”

“Serves him right. Maybe next time he’ll go outside to hurl. The stupid bastard used the crapper and flushed it. God knows what evidence is out in the sewer lines now.”

“I don’t think these guys were careless enough to leave evidence in the toilet.”

“No…” She unfolded her arms, and he watched her expression change from annoyance to concentration. “You said ‘guys’-plural. More than one killer?”