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apartment. That scenario might make sense. A teenage girl besotted with a guy nine years older than she, furious because she had been grounded. Maybe even furious enough to kill? If she had shot her stepmother, she might well run to Guiterrez.
    Officers canvassing Ocean Breeze Drive had no luck finding witnesses. The one exception was when Darrow Halligan contacted the Sugarmans' residence, which was obliquely across the street from the Browns' to the east. Alvin Sugarman had heard something heavy thud against his garage sometime between three and three-thirty that morning, something heavy enough to wake him from a sound sleep. He had investigated, but found no one, and could see no damage to his property.
    Halligan walked with Sugarman, searching his house and yard with flashlights, but they found nothing. The crash against the attached garage had sounded like something— or some one —hitting the siding. This opened up new possibilities. Perhaps there was some outside force that had caused the havoc in the Brown household—someone prowling in the neighborhood who had watched David Brown drive away after midnight, then entered the house where the sleeping young women were unprotected.
    Or perhaps someone had struck the Sugarman garage deliberately to make it appear that way.
    ___________
    * The names of some individuals in the book have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the book.

4

    A lthough the neighbors along Ocean Breeze Drive had slept—at least for the most part—undisturbed through the night of March 18-19, Andy Jauch's roster of people in and people out of 12551 Ocean Breeze was fairly lengthy. Arthur Brown, sixty-five, a bald, nervous man, and his wife, Manuela, fifty-nine, had rushed from their home in Carson, California, to comfort their son. There had been two paramedics, six firefighters (emergency medical technicians whose proximity almost always gets them to the scene of trauma before the medics), two ambulance drivers, and nine investigators.
    Nevertheless, the bedroom where Linda Brown had been shot was kept sacrosanct; once she had been removed by the paramedics, the crime scene was protected. The gun that had killed her still lay on the gold shag carpet next to a brown pillow and a damp pile of towels near the door to the hall.
    There had to be a combination here that would unlock a tragic sequence of events. CSI expert Bill Morrissey worked at preserving and marking every conceivable piece of physical evidence, deliberately shutting out the questioning, the weeping, the palpably raw emotions that hung in the rooms of this house as heavily as the pall of cigarette smoke.
    Linda Marie Brown's life had become a case with a number: 85-11342. Beside the Smith & Wesson, Morrissey left a rectangle of white paper with a printed two-inch scale, and his penned directional sign "N" (arrow), his initials, the date—"TUE 3-19-85"—and the gun's serial number: "R304915."
    He took pictures of everything in the bedroom. If there is one immutable axiom of crime scene investigation, it is the sure knowledge that you don't get a second chance. The murder scene itself will never again be the same. Pictures, diagrams, measurements, notes, had cemented dozens of scenes in Morrissey's mind and in his case files. When he left this room, this house, he would know every square foot better than he knew his own house.
    More important, he would be able to reconstruct what he found now a month, a year, or even a decade later.
    "Bugs" Morrissey was a wiry, sardonic man who kept his sense of humor carefully masked. His wisecracks always took people by surprise. At the moment, he had no reason to find humor in anything. He worked steadily as the first rays of dawn began to light the street outside. He could have no way of knowing that daylight had arrived. The bedroom he worked in had both blinds and drapes.
    The room was yellow, a bright daffodil shade that carried out the