Jeff Mariotte - Blood Quantum

"I'm just curious."

"Of course."

They stood looking at Domingo's body for another minute, Ray wondering how angry someone would have to be to do so much damage with a cigarette lighter. That's a pretty up-close and personal way to do someone in, he thought. And a weapon of convenience, not one that someone who had come here planning murder would have used.

"Ready to get to it?" Nick asked.

"Of course, Nick. Let's go."

"I'll leave you two to do your thing," Brass said, starting toward the front door. "There'll be a uniform outside, and the coroner's people should be here soon. Let me know if you turn up anything interesting."

"You got it," Nick said. "Ray, you want to take the inside while I take out?"

"That works for me," Ray agreed. "Let me get my kit."

Nick walked slowly around the house, training his flashlight on the ground near the doors and windows and then on the doors and windows themselves. He was searching for tool marks, footprints, or anything that might have been dropped near the house, checking each to see if someone had entered through anything except the front door. That door had been left standing wide open, lights blazing inside, which had attracted the attention of a neighbor taking his incontinent briard on a two a.m. stroll. The neighbor had never known Domingo to leave his door open like that, and having been the victim himself of a still-unsolved break-in six months before, he had rushed home and called 911 immediately. Responding officers had knocked, entered, and found Domingo dead in his living room.

The first thing Brass had pointed out to them when Nick and Ray arrived was Domingo's black Cadillac Escalade parked in the driveway in front of a three-car garage. The passenger-side window had been smashed, chips of glass strewn all about the seat and floor, and the brick that had presumably done the smashing still sat on the passenger seat. Nick knew he would have to process the car as its own crime scene, but he wanted to do the walk-around first. Even if he found something out there, he could still process the house's exterior and the vehicle in the time it would take Ray to do the living room. Ray was undeniably thorough, but he was still working on being fast.

The house's landscaping was pure water-wise desert xeriscaping, bare dirt and fine gravel, broken up here and there by a cactus or succulent. It made sense environmentally, and it was a lot easier to search than someplace with a lot of thick grass or bushes. Near a French door at the back of the house, Nick found a series of footprints, really not much more than scuff marks in the gravel. He wasn't sure he would be able to get a good tread impression from them, but at least he could get a sense of the size. He photographed them, using an oblique light source and including a ruler in the shots for scale, then measured a couple. Eight and a half. A man's shoe print, he believed, based on the width, but a smallish foot. And of course, a woman could wear a man's shoe. He hadn't measured Domingo's feet, but the shiny black shoes left sitting by the front door would be boats compared with these.

He stood back and looked at the scuff marks, trying to make sense of them. Someone had apparently come around from the front of the house, approached the back door, and stood there for a bit, moving around a little, side to side, stepping forward and then back. Presumably, the person had gone inside, because there weren't visible tracks leading back the other way. There was soil in a doormat in front of the door, which Nick would have to check out. It probably matched the soil of the yard, as there were no dirty tracks on the inside floor. So he had watched and waited from out there, maybe until Domingo came home in that SUV with the busted window, gone in the back, killed the chairman, and then escaped out the front door, leaving it standing wide open? Made sense. If the killer had a vehicle out on the street, once he had bludgeoned Domingo and written that word on the wall in blood, he would want to make a quick getaway.

Nick turned and looked away from the house, in case the killer had come from that direction instead of the street. Domingo's property angled down to a solid eight-foot adobe wall. On the other side of that appeared to be open desert; Nick could make out a wash with some scraggly desert trees in it, and then on the other side, the land rose again into a series of low hills. Anyone coming that way would have had to do a lot of hiking, then climb that wall. It could be done, but it wouldn't lend itself to a quick getaway. It was more likely that someone drove up, parked outside, then used the darkness and desert landscaping to sneak around to the back of the house. Later, he would look in both directions for footprints matching the ones he had already found.

Examining the brass doorknob, Nick didn't see any obvious fingerprints – patent impressions, visible to the naked eye. He would dust it, though, looking for unseen, or latent, impressions. The door was closed now, so if this person had gone inside, he probably had to open it and then closed it behind himself – or herself; he still couldn't afford to make that call. Before he did that, however, he took a closer look at the shoe prints. There wasn't enough detail to them to make plaster-casting worthwhile. He would double-check in front, on the driveway, the sidewalk, and the street, to see if the shoes had carried some dirt around and made latent prints on the concrete. Failing that, these would be of interest, could maybe buttress a case, but would not clinch any convictions by themselves.

So far, he had a lot of not much at all. He hoped Ray was doing better inside the house.

"Brass."

"Jim, it's Ray."

"What is it, Professor?"

Ray cradled the phone between his ear and his shoulder while he turned over the piece of paper he held in his hands. He had already photographed the room, the body, and the probable weapon from every conceivable angle, then walked around recording his impressions verbally, before even touching the body. "I might have something for you."

"That's fast."

"Maybe we should have looked in Chairman Domingo's pockets before you left."

Brass chuckled. "Maybe so. What've you got?"

"I know where Robert Domingo spent his evening."

"Not sitting at home scrapbooking, I take it."

"Hardly." Ray studied the fine print on the credit-card receipt. "Do you know a place called Fracas?"

"It's this week's trendy nightclub," Brass said. "Loud music, skimpy clothing, watered-down drinks, bad lighting. Just like a lot of other trendy clubs. There's always a new one coming down the pike."

"I gather it's an expensive club. According to this credit-card receipt, Domingo spent eleven hundred dollars there tonight, of which a hundred and fifty was a tip. He cashed out at twelve-fifteen."

Brass gave a low whistle. "That would buy a couple bottles of Taittinger."

"I'm still just getting started processing him," Ray said. "I should get back to it but wanted to let you know that."

"Thanks, Ray. I'll check into it."

Ray ended the call and dropped the phone back into his jacket pocket. He bagged the receipt and wrote the pertinent details on the plastic, then added it to the trove he was developing. Domingo's pockets had contained keys, a wallet, the Fracas receipt, a couple of Mont Blanc pens, and a partial roll of mints.

On Domingo's clothing, Ray found a couple of short orange hairs – they stood out like neon against the shiny black of his silk shirt – and three pieces of some dry plant fiber he couldn't identify. He bagged those, too.

"How's it going, Ray?" Nick asked, coming back in through the open front door.

"It's going." He filled Nick in on what he had found so far. Nick told him he found footprints at a back door, leading by a roundabout route out to the street a couple hundred feet from the house, but no finger-ridge impressions on the doorknobs and no signs of entry at any other doors or windows. Then he left Ray to his work and went back out to process the Escalade with the broken window.