“Why dish gloves?”

“Because there’s an empty box of them under the sink and no dish gloves anywhere in the house. He also wiped everything down with household cleansers and bleach that we believe he found here in the house.” Nan gestured to the one-gallon jugs of Clorox and Simple Green. “There are more bottles of the same brands in the hall closet.”

“She bought stuff in bulk to save money.” Just like Eve’s mom did. Everything they had came from Costco. Eve still did most of her shopping there, not so much to save money but to save time. Buying in bulk meant fewer trips to the grocery store.

“Same goes for the dish gloves, garbage bags, and sponges,” Nan said. “We found the empty packaging and wrappers for the bags and sponges under the kitchen sink, too.”

Eve noticed what looked like a shoe tread in the blood on the bathroom floor. She hadn’t seen it before. “Is that a partial shoe print?”

“A man’s work boot is my guess. He tried to wipe the print away but we brought it back with a spritz of Leuco Crystal Violet, which reacts to hemoglobin,” Nan said. “It’s our secret weapon. We raised more partial shoe impressions throughout the house and in the garage. All the prints and impressions were mixed with blood, cleaners, and motor oil, which tells us they were made after the killings.”

“You’ve told me about Tanya and the dog,” Eve said, and then asked the question she was dreading. “What about the kids?”

“He got them at the front door.” Nan led Eve out to the entry hall and the two backpacks. “I believe they came home from school and were taking off their backpacks when the killer confronted them. He stabbed the boy first, probably in the throat based on the blood spray, and the girl ran to her room. The killer chased her, leaving the boy to bleed out here.”

Nan gestured to a saturation stain in the carpet that proved her point and then walked silently with Eve to Caitlin’s room. They stood in the center of the room for a moment. Eve looked at the bed. It was unmade and the pillowcase was missing. Her gaze drifted over the blood spatter on the walls, the stuffed animals, and the Barbie dolls and realized something was wrong.

“The spatter pattern is almost my height,” Eve said. “Caitlin wasn’t that tall.”

“That puzzled me, too. I believe she jumped on her bed and was going for the window when he got her. He grabbed her by the neck or arm with one hand, lifted her up with his other hand, then finished her off on the floor, where she bled out.” She gestured with her foot at the big saturation stain on the carpet and the bloody drag marks leading to the door. “Then he dragged both of the bodies to the bathtub and cut them up. He put the body parts in trash bags from the kitchen and carried them out to the garage. And that’s where we may have caught a break.”