house is a crime scene. They won’t let you inside to use the kitchen phone again. Who will come for you? How will you get the van?”
Naomi glared at me. I nearly smiled thinking of the days I’d quaked under that look. But I simply waited, expressionless, until she said, “All right, Clara. If I must, I’ll go with you. Just make sure I can get the van later. Or your mother will wake the dead with her fury.”
Agreeing, I left Naomi and walked over to talk to Lieutenant Mueller. When I pulled him to the side and explained the situation, he offered to let us take the van right then if we wanted, but I stopped him. “No, keep it where it is for now. We’ll be back in a few hours,” I said. “But first, I’m going in the house to get a few things for the baby.”
“Sure, but be careful,” he said. “You know the drill.”
I nodded, then I waved at Naomi and shouted, “Everything’s all set. I’ll get Jeremy’s supplies. Be right back.”
As I walked past the bodies, I saw that Doc had Benjamin and Sybille in body bags, and he and one of his assistants had a third laid out next to Anna. I thought of what Carl had said, that she was a good woman. I looked at the small figures of the two children encased in black vinyl. This was the kind of case that strains the heart. The kind that can turn a cop inside out trying to solve it. I thought about Carl at the station house, waiting to be interviewed. Mullins insisted that Carl was the killer, but was he?
Inside the house, the blood on the kitchen floor marked where the medics had worked on Jacob. I walked to the side. The white refrigerator had sooty fingerprint dust all over it. I thought about opening it to look for formula, but then remembered that Laurel was breastfeeding and didn’t have a pump, since that’s why Naomi was here. It seemed unlikely that Laurel had formula for the baby. Rather than take a chance that the fingerprinting wasn’t done and I’d contaminate the area, I decided to send someone to the grocery store.
Skirting around the blood, I spotted a yellow marker under the breakfast table a dozen feet away. I hunched down and saw a knife with a curved, bloodstained blade under the table, the kind used to gut deer during hunting season. The second murder weapon? How strange. The gun was outside. Neither of the weapons had been removed from the scene. The killer didn’t take either one with him. I wondered if he brought the weapons, or if whoever had done this found the gun and knife at the house.
Then I noticed a couple of markers that appeared to designate nothing in particular. They sat on the floor between the blood pool and the knife. I crouched farther down and looked back at where Jacob had been found. That was when I noticed something on the floor: a few faint streaks of blood.
As I got up, Stef walked in with one of the CSI techs.
“What do you make of those?” I asked. They both shot me questioning looks. “The blood smears you marked.”
“Oh, those,” the tech said. He nodded at Stef. “You want to tell her?”
“Yeah. If it’s okay with you?” she asked. The guy nodded and Stef grinned. “Well, Chief, what we think is that Jacob and his assailant wrestled some, and that they ended up down on the floor, and that’s when he cut Jacob’s throat. The reason is that if Jacob had been standing when it happened, we would expect to see round drops of blood somewhere on the floor, the type that form when liquid, in this case blood, falls straight down from an elevated position. There aren’t any.”
“Interesting,” I said, seeing the excitement in her eyes. I, of course, knew all of this. I’ve been on my fair share of murder scenes. But I wanted to give Stef an opportunity to explain it, to be able to display all she’d learned. “Go on.”
“Well, then, once the attacker finished with Jacob, it looks like he threw the knife under the table. It skidded across the floor leaving those bloodstains.”
At that, Stef flung out her right arm, as if she’d thrown away the knife.
I thought about what that might mean. “So, you’re suggesting that the killer was most likely a man and someone powerfully built? Jacob’s