CHAPTER FOURTEEN
This crime scene was a lot fresher than the Estrom house. Perhaps it was the speed they drove there, but by the time Paige pulled up at the door with Christopher, the first news vans were barely starting to arrive, and the CSI crews were only just moving in.
“How long ago was this called in?” Paige asked Christopher.
“Less than a half hour. An au pair working for a wealthy family. I came to get you as soon as I heard.”
A murder had been reported, and Christopher’s first instinct had been to come get her? Did he really think that much of her ability to help him with this case? Paige was both grateful for that and a little intimidated, because of what it implied if she wasn’t the one to come up with answers on this case.
“Let the CSI team go in first,” Christopher said. “We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene any further than it has been by the local cops who were here first.”
They waited, plastic suited crime scene techs moving in ahead of them. Paige could see the TV crews setting up around the edges of the property, cameras already starting to point their way.
“We’ll check the perimeter,” Christopher said. “The local cops have cordoned it off, but I want to see if there’s any sign of how the perpetrator got in.”
Paige walked around the garden with him, checking the flower beds around the edge of the property.
“Here,” Christopher called out, pointing to a spot in the beds. A couple of the crime scene investigators started to hurry over.
Paige saw what he was looking at: a smudged half footprint sat there in the flower bed. Paige guessed that it could have been from a gardener or someone else who worked there, but it was tempting to believe that it was from the killer jumping over the fence.
“You see there?” Christopher said, as the CSI team moved in to take photographs. “That alley across the street? If he came over the fence here, my guess is that he came in through there. We’ll have to check down that way for cameras that might have caught sight of him approaching.”
Paige was impressed by how much he’d gotten from one mark in the dirt. It seemed that he wasn’t done, though.
“Look at that camera. It’s been disabled, and it covers a side door. The killer found a way to get in without being seen,” Christopher said.
Which meant that he’d planned all of this carefully, and that he had the skills to take out a camera without being spotted.
They went over to that door. It was unlocked.
“Either someone inside forgot to lock this…” Christopher began.
“… or the killer picked the lock,” Paige finished for him, which suggested that the killer had at least some basic skills when it came to breaking and entering.
“Exactly. We should be able to head inside now.” Christopher passed Paige a pair of latex gloves to put on. Rather than going in through the side, though, they headed around towards the front door of the house, presumably to avoid trampling on any part of the scene that the CSI unit hadn’t gotten to yet.
“Agent Marriott!” a reporter called out from the edge of the property. “Can you tell us what the FBI is doing here?”
Christopher ignored him, so Paige was determined to do the same.
“Can you tell us what Dr. Paige King is doing here? Is this linked to Adam Riker?”
Paige felt a flash of tension at that. She could remember the other times reporters had been shouting questions at her all too well. They’d delved into every detail of her past in the last case. She didn’t want their attention now.
She and Christopher went inside without providing any of the answers that the reporters wanted.
This house was pretty much the opposite of the Estrom house: bright and ultra-modern, minimalist and decorated in whites and grays, built probably no more than ten years ago. Yet it shared a sense of wealth with the Estrom house, larger by far than most suburban houses would have been, the banks of windows giving a broad view out over the city, the few ornaments looking as though they probably cost more than Paige’s car had.
The crime scene techs were there, moving over it carefully, checking every inch of the place for physical evidence.
“The body is in the living room,” one of them said as Paige and Christopher made their way through the place. “Just through there.”
Paige saw Christopher nod and steeled herself as she stepped into the living room. Even so, it was hard not to be shocked by the sight of a young woman lying face down there on the floor of the room, stripped wood floor around her stained darker with blood, blonde hair pooled around her like a second spill. Paige suspected that it would be almost inhuman not to feel the wave of horror that stole over her at the sight of the young woman there.
Forensic investigators crowded around the body.
“What do we have, Lamar?” he asked one of them, a middle-aged Black man with a short beard whose bulky frame filled out the blue plastic of the evidence suit he wore. He seemed to be running things here, which said to Paige that he had to be with the coroner’s office.