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entrance. Instead the door opens directly into the living room. A man and a woman are on the TV arguing over some food that one of them has accused the other of eating. There’s a cutaway shot, the woman sitting in front of a camera now, telling the audience thatDerek is a jerk and just because she slept with him doesn’t mean he can eat her cornflakes. Derek comes on to tell us all how lazy the cornflake owner was in bed.
    To get to the TV to turn it off, I have to walk around what made the old man outside turn pale. I’m guessing the dead man on the couch was one of his friends. The dead man’s clothes are sliced up and stained in blood, and he’s stained in blood too, like most of the surfaces in the room. It’s hard to tell how many times he’s been stabbed. Anything over one is bad, and in his case I’d say bad happened at least a dozen times. There are lines of blood on the ceiling, cast off from the knife—the blade slinging it onto the walls and ceilings the way an artist might sling paint from his brush onto canvas. There’s blood on the TV, on the coffee table, there’s blood over the guy’s dinner. From the amount of blood on view and pooled into the base of the couch it’s looking like the guy could be hung up from his feet and we’d be lucky to fill a cup. Something has been written on his forehead with a marker.
    This isn’t a burglary gone wrong or a fight over who should or shouldn’t park out front—whoever killed this man invested a lot of rage into the act.
    Schroder comes to the doorway and stops. He crouches down and undoes his shoes, which are covered in mud. He takes them off and in the process nearly tips over. He sits them off to the side of the door, then rolls up the cuffs of his pants, which are also soaking wet. Then he comes in and stands next to me. He looks down at his feet, then shrugs. He’s chewing on a piece of peppermint gum to mask the smell of beer, but his suit needs to chew on the same stuff to complete the illusion. He spends ten seconds looking at the body before fixating on me.
    “Jesus, somebody must have really hated him,” he says, then he puts a hand on my shoulder for the second time today and hiccups into his other hand. “Look, Tate, you shouldn’t be in here,” he says, and before I can say anything he adds “but I’mgrateful you are. I just need a little bit more time to get my head in the game. Forensics are on their way, should only be a few minutes.”
    “And the others?”
    “The others are loading up on coffee and breath mints so they can start asking questions. None of them are going to come within thirty feet of this room.”
    “You should send them home, Carl, and you should go home too.”
    “I know, but then what? Come back tomorrow and hope for the best? Somebody needs to be here, Tate.”
    “And you could all be fired if you stay.”
    “Yeah, then the department would have to hire you, wouldn’t they? They’d need at least somebody manning the phones.”
    “Anything you find will get tossed out in a court of law if anybody gets a whiff you were drunk,” I tell him.
    “I’m not drunk, and in twenty-four hours this case could end up being as cold as my last beer if we don’t do anything about it now.”
    “You shouldn’t be here.”
    “And neither should you. But I’m a realist, Tate, and right now I know I could do with your help.”
    “Just saying that proves you’re drunk,” I tell him.
    He crouches down next to the couch to get a good look at the dead guy’s face. “Herbert Poole with an e has been living here for eight years,” he says, and he really does sound sober. Out the door and in the distance one of the minivan cabs is being loaded back up with some of the detectives, including Detective Kent. Could be they’re all off to grab coffee and doughnuts. “Lots of friends, no enemies, and even if people here didn’t like him this doesn’t seem the way they’d show it. More likely they cut his roses or