“A big one?”

“Barely visible to the naked eye,” Nan said and walked down the hall, stopping near the door to the garage. She squatted and pointed to a single tiny spot of blood on the wall. “This spot of blood is unique. It’s fresh, nondiluted, and it’s nowhere near where the killings occurred.”

“So it fell after the killings,” Eve said.

“And only one person walked out of here alive,” Nan said. “He might have cut himself struggling with a victim or while dismembering a body. We’ll run the blood for DNA, but don’t get too excited. If he, a parent, or sibling aren’t already in the system, it won’t tell you who he is.”

“But it might convict him once he’s caught,” Eve said. Then a smear of blood on the floor caught her eye. It was similar to the shoe print in the bathroom but it was smaller and with a different pattern. “What’s that?”

“Another shoe print, made in the blood and motor oil that was used to dilute the evidence,” she said. “The shoe belongs to one of the children, so we know it was created after the killings.”

“How is that footprint possible?”

“The shoe probably fell out of an overstuffed trash bag that he was carrying,” Nan said. “It underscores that he took all the evidence that he could with him—soiled bedding, gloves, clothes, and the bodies, of course. I’m sure he would have pulled up the soiled carpeting and taken it, too, if he could.”

“It would have been easier to set fire to the house.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to draw a crowd here too soon,” Nan said. “But that’s your department. I’m not a detective.”

The killer had been in this house for hours, killing, dismembering, and cleaning up after himself. This was not a man in a hurry. Eve wondered why he wasn’t worried that Jared or somebody else might show up. Or would he have just butchered them, too? Had he been watching the house and keeping track of Jared’s work schedule? Or, as Duncan suggested, had the killer been hired by Jared and known that nobody would be coming home?

Nan opened the door to the garage and they went inside. There was a washer and dryer against the wall to their left and a metal shelving unit full of gallon jugs of Kirkland detergent and bulk packages of paper towels and toilet paper. The floor was painted concrete with swirls of blood on top created when the killer tried to mop up the mess. Amid the swirls, a couple of footprints stood out.

“It looks like he tried to mop up his footprints,” Eve said and gestured to a mop and bucket against the far wall beside a Walmart bag, which she could see contained more cleaning supplies and trash bags.

“He did a pretty good job of it, too,” Nan said. “But we were able to raise them anyway.”

Eve walked to the end of the blood trail, where there were old stains, infused with dirt and leaves, from fluids that had leaked from a car over a long period of time. She wondered if the car was the Taurus parked in the driveway. “Did you find anything in Tanya’s car?”