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and holding in his hand a blood-drenched knife—the obvious murder weapon. He had not attempted to flee. The young man was now in police custody, being interviewed. He had track marks on his arms: a junkie. It looked like a drug-fuelled burglary gone wrong. Perhaps she had surprised him while he was stealing from her, or perhaps he had made an unsuccessful attempt at rape.
    What a horrible way to die.
    The victim was clothed in blue jeans and a pale blue top, now marred excessively with blood that a mere sixty minutes before had been coursing through her veins. She wore a pair of white socks but no shoes, suggesting she had been relaxing at home when attacked. Karen noticed blood on the victim’s hands, and what might have been defence wounds. Her arms andlegs were splayed, platinum-blonde hair swept messily across her forehead. Since the moment of death, the victim’s body had been cooling one or two degrees per hour, and her skin had already begun to turn waxy and pale, giving her the appearance of a smooth mannequin.
    What a damned waste.
    Karen, who had made detective recently, had seen a few crimes like this. Such scenes did not exactly reinforce the idealistic views of human nature she had entertained in her days as a rookie cop, especially as she had learned that the majority of violent crimes were committed by those known intimately to the victims—lovers, family, friends. So much for the ties that bind. And she’d seen complete strangers kill one another over something as petty as jewellery or cash, even a pair of running shoes. Or drugs.
    Crime-scene investigators moved around the apartment like busy worker bees, going about the painstaking ritual of collecting microscopic forensic evidence. A photographer recorded the body from various angles and then moved on to concentrate on other minute details, his flash illuminating the rooms.
    Karen crouched near the victim and peered at her face through a mess of pale, blood-streaked hair. She had been pretty. Karen noticed that the victim wore no wedding band or rings; her only jewellery was a pair of stud earrings with the two distinctive linked letter C’s of the companyChanel. There did not appear to be any lacerations above the neck, the concentration of wounds being to the chest. Her attacker had missed her heart, leaving time for her to suffer. Crimson handprints traced a fatal struggle around the room, leaving blood across the coffee-table legs and top, an area of white-painted wall and the floor. A stack of magazines had slid off the table; picture frames were on their sides. One frame containing a photo of a middle-aged couple—probably her parents—lay on the floor in a spray of broken glass. It appeared that the struggle might have lasted some time before the stab wounds ended the woman’s life.
    You fought back. You tried.
    An officer swathed in protective clothing moved in and Karen stepped back to give him room. He covered the victim’s hands with brown paper bags and tied off the bags so they were secure for the trip to the morgue, preserving any damning microscopic DNA evidence of the attacker’s flesh under her nails.
    Karen had once seen a rookie cop named Finker use plastic bags instead of paper, causing a murder victim’s skin to slough off inside the moist bags until there weren’t even fingerprints left when the body reached its destination. Karen thanked her lucky stars that she had never done anything quite so damagingly inept in her stage of initiation—not that she was accepted as part of the gang just yet. She was still considered a‘newbie’. Karen may have thrown up at her first dismembered victim, but that was almost a rite of passage. Besides, she’d managed to miss most of the evidence, and that’s what counted.
    ‘Fifteen minutes earlier and we might have caught him in time,’ someone commented.
    Karen looked over her shoulder to see the uniformed officer who had spoken. He appeared shaken, standing with her superior,