“Right. The impressions are at a slight angle. We’re thinking he reared back and kicked hard.”
“Is that how he got in? He kicked in the door?”
“No. There’s no forced entry, no splintering, no damage to the door whatsoever.”
“So she let him in.”
“She let him in.”
“She let in someone who was kicking at her front door?”
“I know, right? So we’re thinking they must have known each other.”
“Huh. All right, all right, I hear you, you piece of shit!”
That sounds like the chief, the way he drives, drawing angry horns from fellow drivers. Cops think they can drive like cops even when they aren’t being cops.
“Sorry. Anyway, yeah, seems pretty obvious that she knew the guy and let him in.”
“Maybe he was making a scene outside,” says Jane, “and she didn’t want that.”
“That’s a theory. That’s a very specific theory. Don’t get locked in too quickly, Janey.”
“I’m not locked in on anything, Chief. But there’s almost no doubt thatthe guy standing by the bushes, peeping through her window, went to her front door and started kicking it, and she let him in voluntarily.”
“Okay, then what?”
Jane and Andy put back on their shoe covers. Jane opens the front door carefully, ushers Andy in, and closes it quickly behind her. The last thing she needs is for the neighbors to see a body hanging from the second-floor railing.
“Inside,” she says. “A glass bowl of Halloween candy, shattered in the foyer. Maybe he knocks it out of her hand, maybe she throws it at him. Hard to say.”
“Okay.”
“She runs for the stairs.”
“The stairs. Not the kitchen, for a knife?”
“Nope. There’s no sign they were in the kitchen, and every sign he chased her up the stairs.” She follows the same boot impressions along the marble floor, then onto the wooden staircase. “Lauren was running in heels, which couldn’t have been easy, although on stairs, it’s easier than on flat ground.”
“Is that true?”
“Stairs, you run on the balls of your feet, even in heels. Flat ground, you can’t.”
She follows the boot impressions, and a few scuff marks where the heels did manage to strike down, all the way up the wraparound staircase.
“They reach the top of the stairs. This, we think, is where he subdues her.” She stops before walking any farther on the landing. “There’s blood up here, right on the landing, the second-floor hallway. Forensics hasn’t been through yet, so we’re just eyeballing. But he hits her up here on the second floor, on the back of the head.”
Jane looks down on Lauren’s dead body, in particular her scalp, bearing a bloody gash.
“Hits her with what?”
“We don’t know yet. But he hits her hard enough to draw blood. We figure it stuns her enough, at least momentarily, so he can get the noose around her neck.”
“How’d he tie off the rope?”
“Well, it was kind of clever,” she says, squatting down. “This is a thick, knotted rope, knotted every foot or so. The wrought iron bannister—well, you saw the photos.”
“I saw them but didn’t focus on the bannister.”