Lindsay could see that Carter didn’t have enough of the liquid to spray every surface of the house, even if he was inclined to. An image of Hope’s dead body on Evan Hunter’s area rug flashed again in her mind.

“Would you mind if we checked the front hallway?” she asked.

Without even bothering to ask for her reasons, he skipped right over all the intervening square footage and began applying the liquid to the hardwood floor in the foyer. The space was halfway covered with spray when Lindsay spotted the glow of pale-blue luminescence, exactly where the missing rug should have been for the open house.

Robin Stansfield actually screamed.

8
Wednesday, June 16, 1:28 p.m.

Detective Carter Decker hit the nearest light switch as quickly as he could.

Jesus H, this was a stupid idea. He had been thinking only of the potential upsides of giving Mrs. Stansfield and her new visitor the all-clear. But now he had a glowing blue zone to deal with in the front hallway of his neighbors’ house.

Robin was moving toward the place where she’d seen the blue light. “Stop,” Lindsay yelled. “We’ve got to preserve the scene.”

Great, the neighbor’s new friend fancied herself a law enforcement expert. She probably had a degree in cable television crime shows.

“So is that . . . blood?” Robin whispered.

“No, we don’t know that,” Carter said. He did his best to run through a myriad of alternative explanations. “We get false positives all the time: fruit juice, cooking oil, paint, glue, cleaning liquid, horseradish. A whole lot of stuff can be mistaken for hemoglobin.”

He could feel Lindsay staring at him. Horseradish?

“They have to follow it up with a confirmatory test,” Lindsay said. “Isn’t that right, Officer Decker?”

She might be a know-it-all, but this woman totally had his number. He had been looking for a way to appease Mrs. Stansfield, but one phone call to his supervisor, and he’d be left explaining why he’d hopped over to a neighbor’s house with a bottle of luminol.

Carter was an ass. He knew that about himself. He was capable of playing the role of a happy-go-lucky eager-to-pleaser, but deep down, he felt absolutely no connection to 98 percent of other people. The day-to-day banter between most human beings was nails on the chalkboard to him.

So why did he always go out of his way to make the Stansfields happy?