“Assuming Chanel was in the back of the house and wearing nothing but a robe you have to wonder how her body ended up near the front door,” Marino is saying while my mind runs along multiple tracks, and I listen for creaking floors, for closing doors, for voices. “There’s no way maybe the housekeeper moved the body in there?”

“Chanel wasn’t killed in one place and then dragged or carried into the foyer if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But the wiped-up blood we could see when you sprayed the marble,” Marino considers. “Maybe there’s other bloody areas that have been washed up.”

“I suspect the goal of cleaning up blood in the foyer was to give us an initial impression of an accident. If you fall off a ladder you aren’t going to leave impact blood spatter all over the place.” I look around and listen for the tactical team. “If you want to lure people down the wrong path at the onset then you’d better clean up any blood or other evidence that doesn’t fit with whatever it is you’re staging,” I add as we wait for any sign that there are four big men inside the house with us.

I listen to the rain and the clocks. Gusting wind rattles the windows. I hear nothing else.

“And this person knew you’d find wiped-up blood and figure it out eventually.” Marino gets closer to saying what by now I’m sure is the inevitable and unfortunate truth. “There’s no question Chanel was murdered where she was found. It’s obvious, right?”

“Based on the blood pattern, yes,” I reply. “She received her fatal injuries while she was down on the marble floor. That doesn’t mean that’s where the encounter started.”

“Like someone got her on the floor without much of a struggle and started slamming her head.”

“Based on my initial examination, the CT scan and what Luke told me that’s the way it looks.”

“We’ve seen this before, Doc.” Marino doesn’t mean in general.

He’s alluding to blunt force trauma deaths that occurred in the past year when a Realtor named Patty Marsico was beaten to death in Nantucket, and young Gracie Smithers died similarly on a rocky shore in Marblehead.

“Carrie Grethen has a habit of bashing people’s brains out like that.” He’s on her trail, locked in with no turning back.

“In several homicides we’re aware of at any rate.”

“The one in Nantucket last Thanksgiving.” He heads there as a crow flies. “Then the one in Marblehead in June. She mixes up her MOs. Beatings, a stabbing, shootings with a PGF, a spear gun. Indoors, outdoors, on land, on a boat, underwater. Whatever the hell she feels like.”

He leans close to the handcrafted silver fish on the pedestal table, nudging the articulated tail with his purple nitrile-sheathed knuckle.