The two detectives grabbed their lunches and headed to their desks to start making phone calls.

“If we take Sells off the board, that leaves us where with Lisa Warwick?” Dixon asked.

“Nowhere,” Mendez said. “But I’m pretty stuck on the idea she was having an affair with Steve Morgan. We asked Peter Crane about it this morning—he and Morgan are buddies—and he about turned himself inside out trying to deny it.”

“I spoke to Morgan this morning,” Vince said. “He’s not interested in owning that. He’s a cool customer. I told him you’ve got semen on Lisa Warwick’s sheets. He said then you’d better test Gordon Sells’s blood type.”

Brow furrowed, Hicks abandoned his sandwich and dug through a stack of papers that had been left on the table over the morning while they were out.

“Here’s why,” he said, holding up a report. “I asked for labs back ASAP on the semen stains. No blood type available. Whoever left that sample for us is a nonsecretor. He wouldn’t be worried we’d match his blood type if he knew his blood-type antigens didn’t carry into his semen.”

“How many people know if they’re secretors or nonsecretors? Most people don’t even know what that means,” Mendez said. “And only twenty percent of the population are nonsecretors. It’s not like he had a fifty-fifty shot at being right. He had to know.”

“Having an affair doesn’t make him a sexually sadistic homicidal maniac,” Dixon said.

“Have you done a thorough background check on him?” Vince asked. “Has he been in any kind of trouble with the law? Where did he come from? What do you know about him? He spends a lot of time with at-risk women. That could make him the Man of the Year, but that same set of circumstances could attract a predator. Has he been involved with other women associated with the center?”

“Jane would never have it,” Dixon said. “If she caught a whiff of impropriety, he would have been out of there. It’s not like the world is short on lawyers.”

“When we asked Dr. Crane if he knew where Karly Vickers was going after her appointment, he suggested she might have stopped by the Quinn, Morgan offices to find out about getting time off to have her dental work done,” Vince said. “Has anybody checked that out?”

“If she left the dentist at five o’clock, the law office was already closed,” Mendez said. “The sign on their door says they close at four thirty.”

“They lock the door at four thirty. That doesn’t mean there might not have been someone still there,” Vince pointed out. “Appointments run late. Lawyers love to rack up those billable hours.”

“Check it out,” Dixon said.