Lieutenant Sales found the roast on the counter. He found green beans still on the stove. He found a sour cherry pie nearly burned in the oven. He found the butter and the margarine half-melted on the dining room table. He found that Pat and Clyde used cloth napkins and tiny separate plates for their dinner rolls. The silverware was polished. The edges of the steak knives were turned in.

He found their unpaid bills in a basket by the telephone. He found clean laundry inside the dryer in the basement—towels, sheets, T-shirts, socks, three sets of Fruit of the Loom and one pair of soft pink satin panties, the elastic starting to give, the bottom frayed and thin. He found an unfinished letter Pat had started writing to a friend who had recently moved to Arizona: What is it like there? How can you stand the heat? He found Clyde’s stamp albums from when he was a boy—tiny spots of brilliant color, etchings of flowers and portraits of kings, painstakingly pasted over the names of countries Lieutenant Sales had never heard of.

He found the bullet that had passed through Pat’s body, embedded in the stairs. He found a run in her stocking, starting at the heel and inching its way up the back of her leg. He thought about how Pat had been walking around the day she was going to die not realizing that there was a hole in her panty hose. He found a stain, dark and blooming beneath her shoulders, spreading across the Oriental rug in the foyer and into the hardwood floors, which he noticed, as he got down on his knees for a closer look, still held the scent of Murphy’s oil soap. He found a hairpin caught in the carpet fringe. He found a cluster of dandelion seeds, the tiny white filaments coming apart in his fingers. He found a look on Pat’s face like a child trying to be brave, lips tightened and thin, forehead just beginning to crease, eyes glazed, dark, and unconvinced. Her body was stiff when they moved her.