Standing in the living room, Somers tried to make sense of what he was seeing. He had only been here once before; he had come with Hazard to question Wesley about his relationship to a murdered man. Somers remembered the impression he’d had at the time: a guy still getting back on his feet, and trying to do it on a pastor’s income. The townhouse still held the same motley furniture, obviously a collection that had been purchased at thrift stores or donated by parishioners. It still had the faint flea-market smell of musty fabric. A few cheap lithograph prints hung on the walls.

What puzzled Somers, though, was the things that were missing. On several of the shelves in the living room, clean spaces interrupted a light layer of dust where items had been removed. Some of them he could guess at—one of those spaces probably marked where a framed picture had stood—but many were just fuzzy shapes in the dust. In the bedroom, it was worse: drawers were open and empty, the clothes hanging in the closet had been pushed aside and knocked askew, as though something hidden behind them had been rapidly retrieved.

“You’re sure we’re the first ones to search this place?” Dulac asked, running a gloved finger through the dust.

“That’s what Riggle said.”

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but it looks like someone beat us here.”

Somers nodded and walked through the house again.

“Wesley and Susan were fighting,” Dulac said. “Maybe she noticed something and got upset. Something Wesley couldn’t explain.”

Somers looked at Dulac.

“Dude, I’m not saying he killed her. But this is weird.”

“What’s weird is that nobody stayed to secure this place,” Somers said. “Not even tape on the door. When they came to arrest him, why didn’t they do a search?”

“Because Riggle hired a bunch of dumbasses, plus they’re newbies.”

“This is a waste of our time,” Somers said. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just come on.”

They drove a few miles, and Somers parked the Mustang, studying the apartment complex across the street: a cluster of single-story buildings, each divided horizontally into three or four units. The blue paint was fading, already a dirty gray at the bottom, and in places the vinyl siding drooped and bowed. Someone in management must have decided a little paint would perk the place up, because the shutters were an eye-watering yellow, but the effect was clownish. Along a few windows, flower boxes held wilting marigolds. This part of town was older; the drainage ditch along the side of the road was grassy and overgrown, and the asphalt was cracked and patched. On the other side of the street, a few single-family residences looked like they’d fall over in the next good thunderstorm.

Susan Morrison lived at 1221 Old York Road, which was the center unit in a building of three apartments. The units backed up to the street, their postage-stamp yards screened by a privacy fence.