“Martin Carstairs. Twenty-eight-year-old white male. He’s upstairs in the bedroom. Myself and another patrol officer took the call and secured the scene seconds after the Fire Department arrived.” The patrol sergeant, who everyone called Big Al, was a quiet giant of a Black man who took his job extremely seriously. “EMT crews arrived on scene, but I denied them access to the dwelling as the victim was clearly dead.”

“Did the fire department enter the building?” she asked.

Big Al shook his head.

“Good.” Signy eyed the trampled snow along the driveway with annoyance. “Get them all out of here.”

She headed inside, donning protective booties and a Tyvek suit on the rickety covered front porch. Inside she nodded to the evidence tech who was dusting a small coffee table for prints. A bottle of whisky sat alone on the table. Twelve-year-old Highland Park. Someone had good taste in booze. She did a quick tour of the downstairs but saw nothing out of the ordinary aside from that lonely bottle of scotch and a rumpled blanket on the couch.

Flashes of light drew her up the stairs to where the police photographer was cataloguing the bedroom. He came out of the room with a grim look on his face.

Death was always disturbing, often messy, sometimes gruesome.

Signy didn’t know what to expect as she stepped inside. She knew the victim had been stabbed but this scene was surprisingly clinical and lacking in blood. She was grateful. She’d just finished breakfast.

The knife in the chest was quite the statement though. Her brows rose. No denying the intent of the person who’d planted that sucker hilt deep. The face of the woman in the back of the cruiser flittered into her mind. You never knew what people were capable of simply by looking at them.

She stood in the room absorbing the details. Clothes in a heap on the floor beside the bed, including what looked like a single black winter glove with a smear of something staining the fabric. Cell phone plugged into the charger on the bedside table. Half a glass of water on the stand. There was a paperback novel on the floor, page corners bent over, marking the spot. He’d never get the chance to finish the story now.

A noise outside the room had her jerking out of her contemplation. Her boss would be calling her for an update shortly, and she’d better have something for him. The two other detectives in the department were working with the DEA and RCMP on a big drug trafficking bust and were unavailable all this week.

Signy was on her own, but she didn’t mind. In fact, she preferred it that way. She’d just applied for a promotion, and she had a feeling this case could make or break her chances.

She took out her cell and captured her own photographs of the room and the body. Then she hurried downstairs, took a couple more snapshots of the whisky bottle and left the evidence guys to finish their jobs.