She found the tape measure in her crime scene case and slipped it into her suit jacket pocket, and looked at the evidence inventory that told her which cone corresponded to which item that had been removed from the scene. Some six feet inside the door, to her left, was cone number one, and this was where the flashlight had been found, described as a black metal Luxeon Star with two Duracell lithium batteries, and in working condition. It wasn’t plastic, as Oscar had described, which may or may not be of any consequence, except that a metal flashlight would be a serious weapon, suggesting Oscar hadn’t struck himself very hard at all to cause the bruises she’d examined.

The cones numbered two through four corresponded to shoe prints lifted from the hardwood floor, described only as having a running shoe-type tread pattern with the approximate dimensions of six and a half by four inches. That was small, and as Scarpetta scanned the list, she noted that a pair of sneakers had been removed from Terri’s closet. Size five, women’s Reeboks, white with pink trim. A size-five woman’s shoe would not be six and a half inches from heel to toe, and as Scarpetta recalled looking at Terri’s feet in the morgue, she remembered them as smaller than that, because of her disproportionately short toes.

She suspected the shoewear impressions recovered near the door were Oscar’s, and likely had been left when he’d gone in and out of the apartment, back to his car, to leave his coat and do whatever else he might have done after discovering the body.

That was assuming his story was true, for the most part.

Other impressions lifted from the floor were of interest because they had been left by bare feet, and Scarpetta recalled seeing several photographs that had been taken in oblique lighting. She had assumed the bare footprints were Terri’s, and the location of them was significant.

All were clustered just outside the master bathroom where Terri’s body had been found, and Scarpetta wondered if Terri had put on body lotion or oil, perhaps after her shower, and that’s why the bare footprints had been visible on the hardwood floor, all in close proximity to one another. She wondered what it might mean if Terri hadn’t taken her slippers off until she’d been about to enter the area of the apartment where she was murdered. Had she been attacked the instant she’d opened her front door, and had she resisted or been forced to the master bedroom in back, wasn’t there a good chance her slippers would have come off earlier?

In all of her years working homicide scenes, it had been Scarpetta’s experience that bedroom slippers, one or both, rarely stayed on once the violent encounter occurred. People literally were scared out of them.