“As a rule, this is true,” I agreed. “In my experience where it hasn’t been true is when the assailant is very disorganized and turns out to be psychotic.”

“Whoever burned Sparkes’s farm was anything but disorganized, you ask me,” Marino said.

“So you’re contemplating that this might be a homicide of a more domestic nature,” Vessey said, now slowly scanning the cranium with the lens.

“We have to contemplate everything,” I said. “But if nothing else, when I try to imagine Sparkes killing all his horses, I just can’t see it.”

“Maybe he had to kill them to get away with murder,” Marino said. “So people would say what you just did.”

“Alex,” I said, “whoever did this to her made very sure we would never find a cut mark. And were it not for a glass door falling on top of her, there probably would have been virtually nothing of her left that would have given us any clue as to what happened. If we had recovered no tissue, for example, we wouldn’t have known she was dead before the fire because we wouldn’t be able to get a CO level. So what happens? She gets signed out as an accidental death, unless we prove arson, which so far we’ve been unable to do.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a classic case of arson-concealed homicide,” Vessey said.

“Then why the hell hang around to cut on somebody?” Marino said. “Why not kill her and torch the joint and run like hell? And usually when these whackos mutilate, they get off on people seeing their handiwork. Hell, they display the bodies in a park, on a hillside next to a road, on a jogging trail, in the middle of the living room, right there for all to see.”

“Maybe this person doesn’t want us to see,” I said. “It’s very important that we not know he left a signature this time. And I think we need to run as exhaustive a computer search as we can, to see if anything even remotely similar to this has turned up anywhere else.”

“You do that, and you bring in a lot of other people,” Marino said. “Programmers, analysts, guys who run the computers at the FBI and big police departments like Houston, L.A., and New York. I guarantee you, someone’s going to spill the beans and next thing this shit’s all over the news.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “It depends on who you ask.”

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