“I’ll talk to the owner,” Sweeney said. “They might have been partway through cleanup. We’ll see what the routine was, how long it usually took. Whoever was waiting to hit the place might have been thinking the girl would leave and Andrew would stay behind to lock the door. Got a surprise when it looked like they were going to walk out together.”

It could have been a robbery, easily. Guns were right for robberies. If both had been stabbed, I might have thought differently. Just because they were both dead, that didn’t mean it was something personal. One of them might have seen the robber’s face, or recognized his voice.

I’d had a few murder-robberies in my time on the drug squad, rival gangs going into each other’s houses and blowing each other away, stealing their stashes. A few times it had been over women, or territory, or insults. The good thing for me had been that as soon as my team walked in on a murder, we walked right back out again. Handed it over to homicide. Sometimes I didn’t even see the bodies, didn’t bother entering the scene in case I messed up evidence. So bodies and death were still foreign to me. I hadn’t worked up the desensitization I was obviously going to need as a private investigator, and I wasn’t blessed with Amanda’s empty toolbox of emotions. I was feeling a little upset at the sight of the dead young people, so I moved off to check out the rest of the place.

I walked along the bar and into the small staff office where another forensics officer was taking prints from the safe. The roster for the night showed Keema and Andrew were the only people on for the evening. It was a Tuesday night. That seemed about right to me. A chef named Ben had left at nine. I noted where he had signed out for the evening. Amanda was correct—Keema had clocked off at 2:45 a.m. Andrew hadn’t signed off at all. The register would give the police a picture of how many customers they’d served. There was a CCTV system, but it was old. I pushed open the flap with a gloved fingertip and found the video tape slot empty. The fact that they were still using VHS to tape the bar’s goings on wasn’t a surprise to me. The bar was ancient, with running repairs visible everywhere. A piece of wood kicked off the bottom of the bar, replaced with a strip of ply. The cracked corner of a mirror held in place with sticky tape. If it wasn’t broken, these people didn’t replace it, and if it was broken they fixed it cheaply.

There was a photograph pinned to a corkboard of a bunch of young people hanging out on the porch of the pub, back when the wisteria was in its infancy. There didn’t seem to be anyone over the age of twenty-five who worked here, spare for an old woman with heavy jeweled earrings who I guessed was the owner.