“Are you sure his phone’s not here somewhere?” one of the other cops asks. “Any possibility he might have dropped it, set it down and doesn’t have it with him? I mean we didn’t see it anywhere. But that doesn’t mean it’s not here. What happens when you call his number?”

“It goes straight to voice mail like the phone’s turned off or the battery’s dead.” Marino tries Hyde’s number again. “Straight to voice mail just like it’s been doing.”

“It’s on the air that we’re looking for him and his car,” Ajax says. “Everybody’s looking from here to Timbuktu. I’ll get a couple backups on the perimeter so you two don’t get lonely.”

“We won’t be here much longer.” Marino slides his phone back into a pocket. “The Doc wants a walk-through of the important areas, and then we’re out. I need the backup units to stay in place until we find Hyde, until we figure out what happened to the victim’s Range Rover. No one unauthorized steps foot on this property or inside the house unless I say.”

“Roger that,” Ajax says. “You know where to find me.”

Marino and I watch them leave, disappearing down the hallway, past the staircase, into the foyer. I listen for the front door to shut. I can barely make out the sound of their SUV starting up. I’m keenly aware that we’re alone again, and I feel the emptiness and the silence as Marino returns to the foyer. He leaves the taped-up paper bag and other evidence near the door.

“You heard what he said,” I say as he walks back to me. “If there’s one covert device there could be others.”

“I would count on it. Ready?” He snaps shut the scene case and picks it up.

Back into the hallway and the next right is the dining room, small with a low ceiling, the table built of an old barn door and surrounded by eight rustic brown leather chairs. Overhead is a Tiffany pendant chandelier, and I scan the dark oil pastoral scenes beneath gallery lights. The paintings depict cows and rolling hills, and meadows and mountains, seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English and Dutch. The dishes in the Georgian breakfront cabinet are very old Chinese porcelain, and I detect the hand of a decorator again.