Touch of Red (Tracers #12)(14)

“We were here all afternoon,” Sean said, pulling her gaze back to him. “We talked to the neighbors. There are some children around, but none that fit.”

“How old?”

He nodded across the street. “People over there have a baby and a three-year-old.”

“Too young.”

“And a block over there are some teenagers ranging in age from sixteen to nineteen.”

Brooke stared down the street and sighed. She started toward the house, and Sean fell into step with her.

“Thanks for meeting me,” she said.

“I was on my way here anyway. It’s been twenty-four hours.”

Sean liked to see a crime scene in close to the same conditions as when the crime occurred. There was no rain tonight, but the lighting would be similar, and probably some of the same people and cars would be coming and going as residents went about their evening routines.

Sean let Brooke go up the front steps ahead of him. He took out his pocketknife to slice through the police seal over the door, then used the key the landlord had given him.

Brooke stepped inside first. Someone had left a box of gloves on the floor near the door, along with the crime-scene log. Sean signed in and passed the log to Brooke before pulling on some gloves.

He stood for a moment and looked around. The house was cold. Still.

“There’s something off about this.” Brooke turned to look at him.

“I was thinking the same thing.”

Sean caught a faint trace of vanilla, but none of the superglue smell that usually lingered at Brooke’s crime scenes. She’d taken the evidence back to the lab for fuming this time.

“When will the scene be released?” she asked.

“Few days. Maybe tomorrow. Depends when the DA can get out here.”

The case was grabbing headlines already, and the county prosecutor was eager to get a piece of it. She’d want to see the scene for herself, along with her staffers.

Brooke walked down the hallway toward the bedrooms, and Sean crossed the living room to check out the television. The remote had been collected for fingerprinting, so Sean used the button on the set to power it on. The Simpsons was beginning.

Brooke walked over and stared at the TV, and Sean took a moment to study her profile. Her neck looked way too distracting with her hair pulled up that way. Even more distracting was the thin black sweater that clung to her breasts. He shouldn’t be having these thoughts about her at a death scene where the blood was barely dry. But he couldn’t help it. Most times he got to see her they were in the aftermath of some kind of violence.

Brooke stepped into the kitchen and went straight for the freezer. She examined the ice trays and poked through the bags of frozen vegetables. The freezer was a common place to hide drugs or money, but investigators hadn’t found anything.

“We did all that,” he said. “Same for the air vents, the toilet tank, and the crawl space.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder.

“I had our drug dog out here, too. He didn’t alert on anything.”

She walked past Sean to stand in front of the open pantry, where she combed through the soup cans.

“What are you thinking?” She looked at him.

“Same thing you are. I’m not buying the drug connection.”

He filled her in on the interview with Sam’s friend from AA, and Brooke’s mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“You think she was on the phone with Samantha when the murder happened?”

“Could be. It’s hard to pin down the timing that precisely, but it’s possible. Anyway, you were right about the AA thing. And this friend doesn’t think Samantha was into drugs at all.”

“So, what then? You think the evidence was planted?”

He scoffed. “Not by us.”

“The killer?”

Sean didn’t say anything. He tucked his hands in his pockets and watched her work through it.

“I see evidence she was a recovering alcoholic and a healthy eater and a neat freak, maybe even OCD,” Brooke said. “But not that she was a drug addict.”

“People fall off the wagon.”

She shot him a look. “You sound like Roland.”

She walked through the utility room and unlocked the back door, then stepped out onto the porch. The brown-black stain covered the area near the door. The landlord, who had talked to Ric that afternoon, was in a hurry to get the place cleaned up and vacated so he could get a new tenant in. Business as usual.

Brooke stared down at the blood, and Sean felt a pang of uneasiness. He didn’t like seeing her standing there.

“Very emotional.” She knelt down and looked at the wood, where the stain went deep into the grain.

Sean crouched beside her. “You mean because of all the blood?”

“The violence of what he did to her,” Brooke said quietly. “So much rage.”

Sean knew what she meant, and he’d seen that kind of emotion before. “Makes me think of a jealous ex. Some guys are allergic to rejection.”

She glanced up at him. Then she looked out at the driveway. “Are you familiar with Locard’s principle?”

“Every contact leaves a trace.”

“Exactly.” She stood up, and Sean did, too. “A perp leaves behind evidence. But the reverse is also true. We haven’t found much of him. The attack happened fast, no sexual assault, he didn’t go inside.” Brooke’s gaze locked on Sean’s. “But if you get a suspect, if you get me his clothes or his shoes or his car, I will find a trace of her on him.”