For this reason, when I step just inside the foyer, I tune out the forensic team milling about, forcing myself to slip into my Otherland, that place where there is nothing but me and the case. I glance toward the den that leads to the kitchen. It isn’t a short trip from the upstairs area, which is where a master bedroom would typically be located. Why would a woman in her precious, to be protected, wedding dress, walk downstairs in that dress just to get a bottle of water?

Medication.

She must have taken some sort of medication. It’s at least one logical answer. And perhaps she was giddy with joy and couldn’t bring herself to take it off. Or it wasn’t her actual wedding dress. Maybe it was a gift, a kinky game, and she was expecting her killer for sex, not death. Or perhaps she put it on downstairs. Perhaps it was just delivered and she just couldn’t wait to try it on.

I flag down a CSI guy. “Have we found the clothes she was wearing before she put on the dress?”

“Not down here,” he says. “Maybe upstairs,” he adds. “That’s another team.”

In other words, with no clothes downstairs, our victim would have had to walk down the stairs naked and put on the dress downstairs. That means that either someone took her clothes, which isn’t so unlike a case I saw last year, or she left them upstairs. I head upstairs and find the bedroom to the right at the end of the hall. I enter the room where a CSI photographer is shooting photos. I flash my badge. “I need the room.”

He grimaces, but he doesn’t fight me. He gets lost. I get to work.

In the center of a mighty bed with towering bedposts is an open white box with a red ribbon pooled on the white comforter. I walk to the side of the bed and inspect the box more closely. There’s no address to be found, which indicates it wasn’t delivered by standard courier, but that doesn’t rule out a special delivery. There’s no card either. I’d assume the dress was inside the box—it’s the right size—but I never like to be an assuming asshole. Assuming assholes are dumb assholes. I know I’m a bitch, but a bitch who uses my attitude to trip people up, to get them to say and do things they might not otherwise say or do. What I’m not, is a dumb asshole planned or unplanned. Whatever the case, I’m back to the dress that might not have been inside that box, but it got in the house somehow and it’s large enough it should be visible on the security feed.