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air smelled of car exhaust and her clothes reeked of cordite.
    Everywhere she looked she saw faces lit up by revolving emergency lights. Faces behind TV cameras, faces behind cameras exploding with bright flashes. Voices spoke behind the crackle of police radios and the rapid machine-gun click of camera shutters snapping. The sounds grated on her already scorched nerves. Too close. Too much commotion, too much goddamn noise and too many people crowding the streets. She wanted to send everyone away. She wanted a cold shower and a stiff drink. She wanted some time alone to quiet her mind before heading back inside the house.
    That wasn’t going to happen. It was time to make a careful study of the house.
    Darby wiped the last of the mud from her boots. She threw the towel on the front floor of the Explorer and changed into a clean bunny suit. From the hatchback she grabbed the new Canon digital SLR camera, which created a digital negative – a raw file that couldn’t be doctored in any way. She walked across the front lawn tucking her wet hair underneath her hood. Thunder rumbled in the distance. She hoped the Wonder Twins arrived before the rain. She’d have to send them directly into the woods. She couldn’t wait.
    She put on a pair of latex gloves, stepped inside the foyer and studied the walls. No bullet holes. She checked the dining room and kitchen. No bullet holes.
    Coop looked up from his clipboard.
    ‘I’ll be upstairs,’ she said.
    He nodded and went back to making notes. He made no attempt to follow. They had worked together for so long he knew she preferred to go through a crime scene alone first so she could think. She couldn’t do that with someone looking over her shoulder, taking notes and constantly asking questions.
    Darby stood alone on the first-floor landing. Cool air rushed down on her from an overhead vent. Her damp clothes clung to her skin. She couldn’t stop sweating.
    Five doorways, each door opened, the lights turned on. Clothes had been tossed into the hall. Bathroom items were scattered across the blond oak hardwood flooring in front of her – a tube of hair gel, hairspray, tampons and pills.
    Looking into the bathroom, she saw a medicine cabinet, its doors open, the shelves wiped clean. Mouthwash, shampoo and pill bottles lined the bathtub. Each bottle had been emptied and searched. Two prescription bottles were floating inside the toilet.
    They were looking for something small. A key maybe.
    Across the hall was a small, carpeted room used as a home office. Shades drawn, desk overturned and closet shelves emptied. Every inch had been methodically searched.
    Had the house been broken into before the mother and son arrived? Then, frustrated at failing to find whatever it was they needed, had they started to torture the mother for information?
    Fingers pulled back, broken.
    Tell me where it is .
    Fingers cut off one by one.
    Tell me where it is.
    Did she tell? Did she know anything? Darby moved to the two rooms at the end of the hall.
    The first, long and airy, contained only a sewing machine and a chair. Shades covered the windows.
    The mattress in the second room had been pulled from the bed, cut with a knife and searched. No shades covering the windows; she could see members of the Photography Unit still taking pictures of the back gate. Clothes on the floor, the kind a male teenager would wear – Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts and jeans, athletic shorts, sneakers and flip-flops. She found an empty red duffel bag with a shoulder strap, the kind used for travelling, lying underneath an overturned nightstand.
    Darby took pictures, then moved down the hall and stepped into the master bedroom, surprised to find it neat and orderly. A big-screen plasma TV hung on the wall across from a king-sized sleigh bed. The twin cherry-stained chests-of-drawers hadn’t been overturned or searched; the drawers were still intact. Like all the rooms with windows facing the street, the shades had been