John Lescroart - Guilt

Thieu needed to talk. 'Stabbed in her bed, Abe. It looks like a burglary gone bad, maybe attempted rape. Sheets and blankets tossed pretty good. Lots of blood – she must have cut the guy.'

Hands in his pockets, Glitsky nodded. 'Okay, let's go on up.'

'Before you do,' Armanino interrupted, 'there are a couple of other things, Sergeant. The paramedics and responding officers were here when we arrived, but we got here right after. Nobody else had been on the driveway. There was no obvious blood on it, though there might be a drop or two, some spatter. I'll keep it clean till the crime-scene guys get here.' Armanino was a stickler for details. Glitsky thought it was undoubtedly how he'd made Lieutenant. 'But in the meanwhile, one of my guys' – he indicated the policeman standing on the driveway – 'found this.' He showed Glitsky a Ziploc bag containing something white dotted with red.

Glitsky took it. 'What is it?'

'It's a surgical glove. It was there in the dirt by the back door, which was evidently the point of exit. Maybe entry, too. The light bulb, by the way,' again he indicated with gesture, 'was dark, unscrewed.'

'Unscrewed?'

Armanino nodded. 'Dorney here put on his own gloves and turned it and it came right back on. And this.'

Another, larger bag contained what, at a glance, appeared to be the murder weapon – a high-quality kitchen knife. The blade's pretty clean, isn't it?'

'It got wiped.'

'But a lot upstairs?'

Armanino shrugged. 'You'll see.' What it meant, if anything, wasn't for him to determine. Neither was Glitsky's definition of 'a lot'. He was simply reporting what he and his men had found.

'That it?'

Armanino looked at Dorney and the Sergeant nodded. A well-oiled machine, these two. Good cops. 'For now, I think so.'

'Okay, Paul,' Glitsky said, 'let's go.'

At the side door, he turned and added quietly, 'Thanks for having Batiste call me.'

The side door opened on to a laundry room with black and white checkered tile floors, a washing machine and dryer. They walked through into the beautiful, marble-countered kitchen, where Glitsky had once sat with Sheila Dooher and had tea.

There were voices coming out of the turret room, but Glitsky followed Thieu as he turned into the foyer and they ascended the stairs to a balustraded landing. It seemed that every light in the house must be on.

A large, circular rug with a Navajo design covered the floor up here. Two panelled doors on the left were now closed.

The bedroom was huge and well lit. Double French doors led to a balcony. There were two darkwood dressers, and a door through which he could see a makeup area and, beyond that, the bathroom.

The woman lay diagonally across the king-sized bed in an awkward position – half turned with one arm under her, the other splayed. Glitsky stood a minute, registering it. Something, though he couldn't say precisely what, struck him as odd. She looked almost as though she'd been dropped.

He remembered the face and looked at it now. In death, there was no sign of fury in Sheila Dooher's last moments – in fact, Glitsky thought, her expression was remarkably peaceful. The hair, mussed from sleeping, still bore the traces of its last brushing and, perhaps tellingly, no visible blood.

Which is not to say there was no blood elsewhere. A blood-spattered white cotton nightie was bunched around her neck, covering her left breast, leaving the right exposed. Only one wound was visible, a inch-long slit out of which seeped a brownish-red ribbon. Her underpants were still on, though they'd been pulled down forcefully, and were ripped.

Glitsky straightened up, backing away a step for a wider angle. Thieu's statement about the blood was a relative one. But Glitsky knew that blood was one of those things – if you weren't familiar with it, a little could go a real long way.

Glitsky's first take on the blood in this case was that there wasn't nearly enough of it. Even Victor Trang had bled substantially more than this, and his killer had used the bayonet to plug the flow. If the knife-wound here had gone to the heart with the victim on her side, which was what it looked like, there should have been massive quantities of blood. Pints. Not a cupful.

'What?' Thieu asked.

But Glitsky didn't answer. Instead, from his new vantage point, back a little from the bed, he noticed something he should have seen immediately. He wasn't going to touch or move the body to make sure, but there were four or five other apparent blood marks on the nightie – he leaned in to see more clearly, now that he thought he knew what he was looking at. They were like brush strokes – straight-sided and tapering, the concentration of blood heavy at one end and lighter at the other.

It could only be one thing, something he'd seen only once before – with Victor Trang – in his career.

The killed had wiped the blade off on his victim's clothes.

Farrell didn't look like a lawyer at the moment.

He was in the pair of white painter's overalls that had been next to his bed. He'd finally finished all the repairs, the caulking and the cracks in the walls of his apartment. For the past few weeks, after work, when he wasn't visiting Sam, he had been haphazardly painting a baseboard here, a door there.

Tonight, after the midnight call from Mark, he threw on the paint-stained pants, stepped barefoot into his trashed topsiders, threw on a ragged and grubby University of California sweatshirt, and grabbed his Giants hat from the peg by the door.

So he didn't look like a lawyer, but he wasn't here as a lawyer. At least he didn't think so. He was here as a best friend. Mark's voice had been calm, though there was no mistaking the anguish. They'd had a burglar, he said. Sheila was dead.

He pulled his Datsun up behind the police cars. The driveway and the street in front of Mark's house were clogged with the ambulance, the coroner's van, the knot of curious neighbors, two local news trucks.

He went up to the nearest uniform. 'Excuse me, I'm a friend of the resident here. He asked me to come over. I'd like to go up to the house.'

The cop had his orders, though. His arms remained crossed, and he shook his head. 'Afraid not. This is a crime scene. It's closed to the public.'

'I'm not the public. I'm an attorney.'

The officer looked him over.'Then be an attorney outside. This is still a crime scene.'

'Look, why don't you go ask Mr Dooher if he wants Wes Farrell up there with him?'

'You're Wes Farrell?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, Wes, we don't run things the way Mr Dooher wants them run, especially at a murder scene. You know what I mean? We're investigating a crime here. We don't want people tramping all over the evidence. That's how we do it. Now, when we're done, you can go up. Meanwhile, somebody comes out, I'll send word up if I can see some ID.'

Wes patted his empty pockets. He could visualize his wallet on the top of the dresser next to his bed at home.

He considered breaking and running up the pavers, but figured he'd get shot or arrested or something for his troubles. No. The only hope was to drive the two miles back home and get his goddamned ID. 'Have a nice night,' he told the cop.

A polite smile. 'You, too.'

The CSI – crime-scene investigation – unit knew the drill, and Glitsky knew them. He didn't want to step on toes, but he wasn't working backward from any theory now. This time he was looking at what he knew was evidence, not wanting it to go away through inadvertence or simple bad luck.

He walked up to Sergeant Jimmy Ash from the photo lab, a gangly, forty-year-old freckled albino who, tonight with the late hour, even had pink eyes, and who'd already 'painted the room' in videotape. Ash was standing by the bed, taking stills of the body that had been Sheila Dooher.