She put on rubber gloves and Tyvek shoe covers in her car and entered the house through the kitchen. This was her third time in the crime scene and each visit provoked a different reaction. The first time she’d felt the urgency of the mission and the shock of what she’d discovered. The second time, her reaction was emotional. Now she found herself feeling detached, her interest more clinical and detail oriented. It may also have been a reaction to how the house and circumstances had changed.

There were now multicolored plastic cones on the floor and numbered pieces of tape on the walls to mark different kinds of evidence. A lot more technicians were in the house, collecting samples, taking photos, and making measurements, creating a work environment alive with activity and purpose. It was a stage that had been reset for the second act.

Eve went to the refrigerator and examined a child’s crayon drawing of a dog, presumably Jack Shit, pinned to the appliance with a plunger-shaped magnet from Mr. Plunger. It wasn’t the emotional tug of the artwork that drew her interest. It was spots of blood on the paper that were at eye level to her. The spots got larger as Eve followed the spray over the cupboards and down across the boxes of cereal and granola bars on the counter.

Nan Baker came into the kitchen and Eve turned to her. The CSU chief had a surgical mask over her nose and mouth.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Eve asked.

Nan lowered her face mask to speak. “I can say with reasonable certainty that three people and a dog were stabbed to death and dismembered in this house.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Eve wasn’t surprised by Nan’s conclusion but it confirmed her worst fears about what she was dealing with. “How can you be so sure?”

“There are three groups of bloodstain patterns in three separate areas of the house, three places where there’s significant blood saturation, and three places where there are drag patterns of blood on the carpets and floors that lead to the bathroom. That tells me that three people were assaulted, fell, bled extensively for a while, and then were dragged into the bathroom, where we’ve found bone, brain matter, and other fragments consistent with dismemberment.”

“How do you know it’s human blood?”

Nan gave her a withering look that immediately made Eve regret asking the question. But Eve was just trying to cover every base.

“It was obvious to me it was blood and from the amount and the spatter that it was human. But even so, we first test stains we think are blood with tetramethylbenzidine, to determine if we are correct, and then do a field test using HemDirect to determine if it’s animal or human. As it turns out, we did find a small amount of animal blood, but I will get into that shortly.”

That would be the dog. Eve asked, “When did the attacks happen?”