“Where is everyone?” I ask and it sounds like we’re inside a car wash. “Where’s your backup?”

“Damn good question.” Marino is on high alert as he scans the long narrow driveway, the front of the house, the dense old trees shaking and losing leaves in a battering wind.

“I thought you instructed that the property was to be secured.”

“I did.”

“There’s not a police car in sight and where’s the red Range Rover?”

“No kidding. This is fucked up.” Marino releases the thumb snap of the black leather holster on his hip, and thunder rumbles and cracks.

“Did you instruct Vogel, Lapin, maybe Hyde to have it towed to the labs?”

“There was no reason to do that. We weren’t really thinking foul play until now. Maybe Bryce took it upon himself to get it towed after you talked to Anne and Luke and decided this is a homicide.” Marino is scrolling through the contact list on his phone, glancing up every other second, his eyes moving constantly.

“I talked to them not even half an hour ago,” I remind him. “There’s not been time for the Range Rover to have been towed, and certainly I didn’t request it and there’s no way Bryce would have.”

“I sure as hell didn’t tell anybody to tow it.” He wipes condensation off the side window as he stares out, checking the big mirror for the empty stretch of rain-swept driveway behind us. “The Range Rover key was on the kitchen counter and Hyde took a quick look inside it. He said he didn’t see anything interesting. In fact there wasn’t much in it at all and it was his impression maybe it hadn’t been driven in a while. That was what he said, and we didn’t do anything else because we were operating under the assumption there was no crime involved, just an accident. At that time there was no point in thinking about processing her car.”

“What happened to the key after that?”

“I have it and the house key.”

“Obviously there’s a spare unless the Range Rover was hotwired or gotten out of here some other way.” I look around to see if anything else might be missing or altered since we were here midmorning.

The centuries-old house is shrouded in a gray mist that rises up from the rain-splashed earth, and my attention fixes on the solitary strip of crime scene tape barricading the brick front steps. The flimsy yellow plastic tape shivers in the wind and rain, and it wasn’t there earlier. More importantly I notice the absence of scene tape anywhere else. It’s not barricading the kitchen door we used this morning. It’s not wrapped around trees or across the driveway.