Four weeks later, those same fingerprints turned up at burglary number two, at a house around the corner. This time the owners were not home. Entry was again through an unsecured window. Cash, jewelry, and a MacBook Pro were stolen.
Another laptop. Was that significant, or was it just because they were portable items that every household now owned?
Jane moved on to the third burglary, which took place six weeks later, at the Dolan residence. Again, the homeowners were absent. This time the burglar broke a kitchen window to enter, and the police report included a photo taken by the homeowner of shattered glass littering the floor and the countertops. While cash and several watches were stolen, there was no missing laptop because the owner had been traveling with it. A size-ten Nike shoe print was found in the backyard. No fingerprints this time; perhaps the burglar had advanced to wearing gloves.
Jane studied the photo of the broken kitchen window and thought of the broken glass in Sofia Suarez’s kitchen. She pulled up the Suarez crime scene photos and clicked through the images. She found photos of the shattered door pane and the kitchen floor where a few shards were lying, but she found only two photos of the side yard, its graveled walkway glittering with glass. She went back to the photo from the Dolan break-in and frowned at the amount of glass scattered across the kitchen floor.
I need to go back, she thought.
Frost had gone home for the day so she drove alone to the Suarez residence. It was just past six when she pulled up in front of the house and stepped out of the car. The crime scene had been released days ago and the biohazard cleaners had already been here to scrub and sterilize, but mops and bleach could not cleanse the images from Jane’s memory. They still haunted her as she climbed the porch steps and opened the front door.
The air was sharp with the odor of chemical cleaners, and she left the front door open for ventilation. She paused in the living room, memories overlaying the now-spotless floor with images of smears and spatters from her first visit. She could still see the fallen stethoscope, and the bloody trail left by Sofia as she’d dragged herself away from her attacker. Jane followed that remembered trail through the living room, past the vacant spot where the aquarium used to be, and into the dining room. Even here, where the pool of blood had collected beneath the body, the floor was now spotless.
Good job, cleaners.
Jane walked on into the kitchen. Here was the one room where she wished the cleaners had not been so thorough, but the floor had been swept, the surfaces wiped clean of fingerprint powder. The broken windowpane in the door was boarded over, blocking out the day’s last sunlight, and the room felt boxed in. Airless.
She opened the kitchen door and stepped outside, her shoes crunching onto gravel. This is how they’d assumed the killer accessed the house. Smashed open the door pane and reached through the broken window to slide open the bolt. She remembered seeing shattered glass on the ground here, as well as inside the kitchen, but it was gone now. She should have paid more attention at the time, but she’d been focused on the body and the spatters and the blood trail from the living room. She’d been trying to establish when the first blow landed. How the attack began and how it ended.
She crouched down and searched the gravel, but the cleaners had been thorough about plucking up the shards. She scanned a wider and wider radius and was all the way to the fence when she saw a reflection wink back at her. Gingerly she fished out a shard of glass that had wedged up against the board and she deposited it in an evidence bag. She turned and eyed the kitchen door, which was a good two yards away. The glass didn’t just drop there against the fence; it had been propelled.
She stood listening to the hum of insects, the growl of traffic. Even here, surrounded by houses and cars and a million other people, one could be utterly alone. She felt her heart thudding, heard the whoosh of blood in her ears as she thought about broken windows and scattered glass and stolen laptops.
And patterns. Maybe there, maybe not.
A loud thud made her jump. The front door. Was someone inside?
She stepped back into the kitchen and paused, listening. Heard the hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the wall clock. There is no such thing as a silent house. She walked into the dining room and paused again. Realized she was standing in the very spot where Sofia had drawn her last breath. She couldn’t help glancing down at the floor and remembering the body lying where her feet were now planted.
She moved into the living room and stopped beside the spot where the aquarium used to be with its burbling water pump and bug-eyed goldfish. The front door, which she’d left wide open, was now closed. Blown shut by the wind, she thought; no reason to be alarmed.