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up before leaving.
    But the concept made her feel even more uneasy than she already was. The idea that the doer took the time to clean up instead of bolting the moment he committed the murder indicated a certain measure of confidence, even arrogance. That he clipped off the woman’s second toe and took it with him pointed to the outer reaches of madness.
    Someone switched on a light in the house directly before her. She looked through the window and saw the man she’d met with the white dog at his kitchen counter pouring a bowl of cereal. Next door she noticed an old man reading the paper on his sunporch. To the right of the Brants’ house, an older woman was pretending to water her garden in the rain while sneaking peeks at the crime scene tech on the other side of the fence.
    It was an established neighborhood in a remote location. A neighborhood that was aging.
    Lena let her mind drift, trying to imagine what it must have been like before the murder. She had seen the photographs of the victim. She saw her face and body. Nikki Brant was a beautiful young woman. Although there were curtainsin the bedroom, the large panes of glass in the living room had been left bare. If the doer sat here trying to make a decision, if the seed of the crime began with rape, he had a wide-open view and Nikki Brant would have been his obvious first choice.
    The breeze picked up, the branches rustling overhead. She saw Stan Rhodes enter the backyard and reached inside her pocket for her can of Altoids. Popping a mint into her mouth, she watched Rhodes scan the property. His jacket was off, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Rhodes didn’t have the bulky figure of someone who belonged to a health club and sat at a machine performing the same mind-numbing exercises over and over. Instead, his body had the smooth elegance of a long-distance runner—lean, long, and trim. His brown hair was rich and dark. He had a strong chin, a smart face, and Lena could still remember what she was thinking the day she first met him.
    Bad timing.
    Rhodes had been seeing the same woman for more than two years. Lena had met someone new three months before, and though it had its ups and downs and eventually blew up in her face, the relationship felt pretty good at the time.
    She smiled at the memory. The bad timing.
    Their attraction for each other had been immediate. When they spoke about having an affair, Rhodes told her that his relationship was on the rocks and that he had never been more willing. But as Lena thought it over, she couldn’t go through with it. She didn’t want to be the cause of a breakup, and mixing her job with her personal life seemed too complicated. She had just become a cop and hadn’t even finished her rookie year. They hadn’t seen each other or spoken since. And now that they could, it seemed as if he was deliberately ignoring her. Their desks were on the same floor, facing each other less than half a room apart. Over the past two months, she hadn’t caught him looking her way even once. It seemed so forced, so rigid and absurd. She felt awkward whenever he was around, often wondering if she’d read it wrong and made a mistake. Until today, she thought.Until he’d stepped out the front door of the death house and looked at her as if everything between them was okay again.
    She stood up and stretched her legs, then moved quickly down the steps, anxious to get back to the crime scene. As she climbed over the fence and hopped down on the other side, Rhodes was still in the backyard. He looked at her with those dark eyes of his and moved closer.
    “Anything?” he asked.
    “He could’ve sat in his car and picked her out,” she said. “It reads like a menu.”
    He turned and gazed at the back of the houses. When he spotted the old man in the sunporch, Rhodes smiled and got it. His hand brushed against her shoulder, and they crossed the lawn to the house.
    “We’re okay, aren’t we?” he said.
    She met his eyes and nodded. In