Jordan worked the knife blade under the tape and sawed upward. She cut through the binding and freed Avery’s first hand. “Take the knife. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“Keep cutting.”

In the academy, she had been trained to neutralize the threat. And right now, the only advantage she had was the darkness. She could not see, but that did not mean she could not even out the playing field.

She hurried into the kitchen pantry, fumbled with the latch on the metal circuit breaker box, and opened it. Her trembling fingers groped along the straight-row circuit breaker switches. At first, she lost track of what lever controlled what, and then she realized she had to shut it all off. She counted down fourteen spots to the master switch. She flipped it off.

What little light her eyes processed completely vanished.

“Very clever, Jordan.” The man’s voice was barely a whisper, but it carried familiar notes from the living room. She pictured him sitting on her couch, enjoying this drama playing out. “Do you think we’re now on an even playing field?”

“It’s flatter than it was.”

Spencer pulled the surveillance tapes from Thompson’s Market and had been reviewing them for nearly two hours. The guy showed up at his store at 6:16 a.m., which witnesses said was about an hour later than normal. He had made excuses about his alarm clock, but his two morning employees had thought that odd. The man had woken up before his alarm for almost two decades.

Customers began arriving at the store at 7:00 a.m., seconds after he flipped the sign from CLOSED to OPEN. He served up breakfast sandwiches that a young kid made on the grill and by 11:00 a.m. was taking deli orders. When he scribbled his first note on butcher block paper, Spencer noticed he used his left hand. He replayed the scene, and as he watched again, he remembered the gunshot wound on Rawlings’s right temple. A left-handed man could shoot himself in the right temple, but it would be awkward, and the angle of the wound would reflect it.

Jordan had said Rawlings’s suicide did not feel right to her.

His interest sharpening, Spencer fast-forwarded through several more hours, pausing each time Rawlings wrote a note. He used his left, never his right.

Spencer sat back in his seat. He had not received any preliminary forensic reports from the Rawlings crime scene, and the autopsy would not be until late tomorrow. Until then, he would not know which of Rawlings’s hands had gunpowder residue.

Why would a left-handed man use his right hand to kill himself? He could have used both hands to steady the gun. That would have made sense if he had placed the gun barrel into his mouth or under his chin.