Was it possible Darby had killed this guy? It was so completely out of character, but what if they’d started having sex and she’d panicked? After everything that had happened to her it wouldn’t be surprising. It was no excuse, and he didn’t believe it. Couldn’t allow himself to give up on her. Not now, not ever.

“Where did the knife come from?” he asked.

Torgerson shook her head. “Not sure yet. It’s in evidence.”

“Make it the priority.” He needed to know if Darby’s prints were on that knife. “If you don’t have the resources here, like I offered earlier, we can use the nearest federal facility.”

“We can handle a knife.” The detective turned her back to him, and he was pretty sure she was rolling her eyes.

“Take it apart. Run DNA. Do you have any motives yet?”

Torgerson swung to face him. “Not yet. We’re questioning all their friends to find out about their personal history. They might have been dating.” They hadn’t been. “Or had some sort of falling out at work.”

Hardly something Darby would kill over. She would stand her ground, but she wouldn’t take a grudge and turn it into an excuse for murder.

Eban held Torgerson’s stare for a moment. “You think she did it?”

The woman’s gaze turned probing. “What surprises me is that you don’t. Anything you aren’t telling me, SSA Winters?”

“Like what?” He forced himself to smile slightly. Did the detective know that Darby had been kidnapped in the Banda Sea last summer? If she didn’t, it wouldn’t be long before she did. It had been all over the news. And then she might figure out why an agent from the Crisis Negotiation Unit might be so interested in a simple homicide investigation. Except she’d be all wrong.

“You tell me.”

He shrugged and said nothing.

Torgerson became impatient. “What would you like me to do next? Search the carpet for fiber evidence?”

He raised an unimpressed brow. “You haven’t done that yet?”

She snorted.

“You have objections to me wanting you to conduct a thorough analysis of the crime scene, Detective Torgerson?”

She touched her brow as if she had a headache. “No. Of course not. Not at all. I guess I assumed this was a slam dunk case.”

Eban hoped to hell it wasn’t. “Let’s see what the evidence tells us. All the evidence.” Not just the cherry-picked details.

He headed back down the stairs and went to the kitchen and stood looking out of the side window. “You need to have both vehicles processed for fingerprints and DNA.”

“Why? Martin wasn’t murdered in his vehicle.”

Because Darby wasn’t a killer and he wanted to prove reasonable doubt in a jury’s, if not this detective’s, mind.

Eban turned to face the detective. “Darby O’Roarke’s story doesn’t make sense. If she did it, why stay here until morning? Why tell you she slept on the couch and found Martin Carstairs dead upstairs? Why not wipe everything down and destroy any evidence she was here and leave? Burn her clothes? Go into work? Claim he was alive when she left? Or deny ever having been here? Why not say he attacked her, and she killed him in self-defense?”