“None.”

“Struggle?”

“No.”

Kir kept moving. Past the half bath in the hallway and the mostly restored black and stainless steel kitchen to the staircase at the back of the house. “The police?”

“Haven’t been notified. The men have combed the streets and are keeping an eye out for anyone suspicious.”

“There will not be anyone.” The finality behind Roman’s quietly muttered words was absolute, fueled by a lifetime of experience. “No struggle. No forced entry. Whoever did it—Kevin knew them, and their act was planned.”

The upstairs was simply laid out. Two small, plain bedrooms that overlooked the meager backyard, and a nice-sized master suite that fronted the street. Kir strode toward the master, his gut roiling higher even as his muscles braced for the visual impact of what waited inside.

He paused at the threshold, as did Roman, years of detached experience pushing past his anger. The gold curtains that had been left behind when Kevin bought the place were drawn shut. The unremarkable painted gray dresser and space-age computer desk seemingly untouched. The only things out of place were the discarded T-shirt on the floor, the pooled blood on the rumpled comforter and the bare-chested dead man staring up at the ceiling.

“He hasn’t been moved,” Roman murmured in Russian. “He could have been caught sleeping.”

Kir shook his head and prowled deeper into the room. “Nyet. The lamp beside his bed is on. It would not have been if he were asleep. He was also fastidious. He would not have thrown the shirt aside unless something else had his attention, or he was told to.”

“A woman?”

“Perhaps.” Kir stopped at the foot of the bed and studied his slain soldier. Short messy brown hair and a tall, yet lanky body that came from too many hours behind the computer and forgetting to eat. He was only twenty-five and, unlike the majority of his men, had always had a childlike innocence about him. A goofy smile usually graced his face, but tonight that smile was gone, his mouth slack and his skin void of life. “Or a woman as a diversion.”

Kevin’s computer sat open on the desk, the front edge of the laptop perfectly horizontal to the edge.

Odd.

Where Kevin might make sure everything was in its perfect place the vast majority of the time, his computer was seldom out of reach.

Kir turned to Mikey and Reggie both waiting just inside the doorway. “Has anything been moved?”

Reggie dipped his head toward the far side of the bed. “Just that piece of paper on the floor. I knocked it off when I checked for a pulse. Everything else has been hands-off.”

Kir rounded the bed. At the far side was a simple piece of white copy paper that had once been folded into quarters lying facedown on the hardwoods. Grasping it by one corner, Kir flipped it over.

Alfonsi’s Downfall stretched across the top of it, topped only by the television station that had sourced the picture and the author who’d penned it—Cassie McClintock. The picture was a candid one of Sergei walking on a neighborhood street, his gaze aimed over one shoulder as though he sensed a camera on him. The quality of the print job was grainy at best, but the frown on Sergei’s face indicated he hadn’t been in the best of moods when the picture had been taken.