She leads him back down the long dark hallway, and to the dining hall once more.

“Bri Beake found Mara Mattingly hanging dead from the rafters at approximately 3:30 a.m. She screamed, alerting the others. Within minutes, all five women were in the dining room, staring at their so-called friend’s dead body. It was Rosalee herself who dialed 911 and alerted the authorities,” the detective states, matter-of-factly.

The body is gone now, tucked away on ice at the local morgue, and soon to receive a full-scale autopsy that will hopefully tell them anything that they have missed.

The food still rots on the table. It smells like carnage and death, a sharp piercing smell that makes Matthias’ belly twist and claws at the back of his throat. The odor seems to have no effect on his mentor, or else, she hides it well.

“Someone killed her and then the maid hung her corpse up to make it look like a suicide…,” Matthias says, breathlessly, staring at the phantom body he can still see in his mind. It swings there, eerie yet calm, those cold dead eyes staring back at him.

He will probably never erase that image of Mara Mattingly, no matter how hard he tries. It is burned onto his retinas, etched in the grooves of his cerebral cortex.

“Or it’s possible that the maid and her staff both killed and strung her up. We don’t know that she is telling the truth, Detective Smalls says. She whips around, leading her assistant room by room, eventually stopping at the library again. This room, with all its knowledge, puzzles her more than any other.

“This still bothers me,” she says, nodding at the blood pool illuminated by luminol on the floor, and the spatter on the ceiling behind it.

“Yeah, it’s super disturbing,” Matthias says, then shudders.

“Look beyond that, Matthias. Yeah, it’s a lot of blood, but where is the rest of it? If the killer dragged the body out of here and into the dining room, where is the blood trail? There should be a bloody streak from here, all the way to the dining room. Delfina said that she found the body right here in the dining room, but it can’t be the truth. There’s no trail…”

“Maybe the killer cleaned it up so well that we can’t see the trail with the luminol. I mean, it is possible. I’ve read cases…”

The detective tilts her head from side to side, still trying to see it. “It is possible, you’re right about that. But tell me—if they went to all that trouble cleaning up their trail, then why skip cleaning in here? Makes no sense.”

“Perhaps someone walked in and caught them before they could finish cleaning? Perhaps they were interrupted?” Matthias says, voice quickening with excitement.