“How?”

“He had a key.”

“And who was this?”

“Ken Damon.”

He had a key. “Did he and Ms. Parkin have, um, anything going on?”

“Ken Damon’s forty-one, married, with two kids.” The expression on Porter’s face told Swanson, Yeah, they had something going on.

“Then what happened?”

“When Damon found no sign of Ms. Parkin, he called us.”

“Okay. Thank you. I’d like to see the scene now, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.” Porter led the way back out of the kitchen, made a left, and stopped at an open door marked with the crime scene tape she’d seen earlier. Beyond lay a large bedroom with expensive new furniture, the kind that a young woman with money and a promising career might favor. Everything was in its place and spotlessly clean. A walk-in closet and a private bathroom lay beyond. The bathroom looked equally clean, nothing out of place except a bath towel that appeared to have been tossed to one side, ready for the hamper.

Porter lifted the tape for Swanson and she stepped inside. The room was unoccupied except for one member of the CSU team, obviously finishing up. There were pins and flags in various places, along with a couple of chalk scrawls. But the thing that immediately caught her attention was the huge pool of blood in the middle of the room. It had been soaked up by the plush carpeting, but even so, she guessed from the deep color and the glistening sheen that at least a liter of blood, maybe two, had been spilled here.

Near the stain was a Turkish rug of embroidered black and red, one end flipped back.

“And this bloodstain is the only physical evidence so far?” she asked.

Porter nodded. “No blood spatter anywhere, no signs of a struggle, no droplet trail from a body being dragged or carried. Nothing broken or missing that we can determine. Of course, we only have the one person familiar with the place, so it’s a little hard to be sure.”

“You mean the brother?”

“No. Mr. Damon. The brother refuses to talk to us.”

She looked at the room again, taking it in now with a more critical eye. It was as the lieutenant had said. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. If the rug hadn’t been lifted to expose the stain, nobody would have been the wiser. The way Porter referred to the brother, and given the cop on guard outside his door, it seemed he might be their number-one suspect.

She pointed to the carpet. “Who pulled it back like that? Mr. Damon?”

“No. But he knew that carpet was usually located in the hall. That’s why he called us.”

Smart, Swanson thought. Not only was he boning his young associate, but he knew the apartment well enough to see when a rug was out of place—and not to touch it. “Any idea when this happened?”

“Based on the blood chemistry, they’re saying around thirty-six hours ago. The blood type is hers. We’ll be confirming that with DNA.”

Thirty-six hours. That would have been one, maybe two o’clock on the morning of May 2. “Fingerprints?”

“Her fingerprints everywhere, of course. And Damon’s, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, the bedroom.”

“And the brother?”

A pause. “We haven’t printed him yet. But there don’t appear to be any prints from a third party in the bedroom, and no sign of wiping down.”

“Got it. Any idea who was last in contact with her?”

“According to her phone records, she called a few friends on the night of May first. She called Mr. Damon around twelve thirty on the morning of May second.”

“Twelve thirty?”

A flicker passed across Porter’s face. “Damon confirms it. He says the call was in regard to their court appearance at ten AM yesterday morning.”

“And I suppose Damon has an alibi for the rest of the night.”

A brief pause. “He was in bed with his wife, and she confirms.”

Half a dozen snarky observations came to mind, and Swanson bit them all back. “Anything else of interest? Controversial cases she was involved in? Drug problems? Past history? Enemies?”

“Nothing we know of. And there’s no body—which adds investigative and legal complications. There’s no indication of forced entry or exit from either the apartment or the building. Unlike her shitbag brother, she wasn’t under suspicion for anything, so it’s doubtful she fled—no items of clothing are missing that we know of, no sign of packing. Nothing’s been stolen, again as far as we can tell. Her car is parked in its assigned spot downstairs. No eyewitnesses. There hasn’t been any activity on her credit cards. As for enemies, you might want to ask him.” And he nodded in the direction of the brother’s room.

“Why’s that?”

“Because more than once neighbors have complained of disturbances. The two argued frequently. The brother also showed signs of physical aggression. One morning, he ran after her as she was driving away from the building and hit the trunk of her car with a hammer. She refused to press charges.”

As Porter spoke, Swanson was taking one more look around the room. But she could already tell there was nothing to see here—not, at least, without a microscopic investigation. She tried to empty her mind of outside influences, such as her opinion of Ms. Parkin’s taste in furniture or her curiosity about the expensive-looking porcelain figures in the glass cabinet on the far side of the room. Let the room speak to you, one of her instructors had said.

Three other people with the same last name had been dug up, their bodies stolen over the last six months. Now, a fourth—a living Parkin, this time—had gone missing. No indication of forced entry or a struggle; nothing stolen or missing. Except the woman herself. Nothing strange—besides, of course, the massive quantity of blood, hidden casually beneath a Turkish rug.

Swanson’s mind went back to the Glorieta Pass cemetery, and the hole in which Frank Serban died. That was a professional job. And this one was looking professional as well. Nothing disturbed, nobody seen, nothing heard. In her mind, she visualized two figures in black entering the bedroom. One grabbed Rosalie Parkin and hauled her from the bed, hand over her mouth. He dragged her to the middle of the room. The other one took careful aim and stabbed her with a blade, cutting a major vein—maybe the subclavian or the vena cava. That would spill a lot of blood, but at a low pressure, like 20 mmHg, so it would flood rather than spurt and not splatter the perps. As Parkin’s ability to resist dropped, they bound her hands and taped her mouth, and maybe bundled her into a waterproof bag that would contain additional bleeding. Then they pulled over the rug to cover the stain, to buy a little more time.

She glanced at the nearest window, which looked down onto a back alley. If they parked there, they could be in and out without anybody noticing. Even the brother.

The brother.

Shaking away this scenario, she turned toward the lieutenant. “What’s the brother’s name?”

“Ernest,” Porter said, handing her the tablet. “Feel free to talk to him; he’s been Mirandized. I hope you can get more than we did.”

Swanson made her way through the apartment in the direction of the thumping. The cop outside the brother’s door stepped aside and nodded as she approached. She tried the knob, was surprised to find that it turned, then realized the mechanism was broken—perhaps by the cops. She opened it and was almost physically pushed backward by the wall of heavy metal music.