On the cluttered counter are bottles of oil, homemade infusions, spices poured into jars and marked with careful handwriting. A row of herbs grow in small pots on the windowsill—basil, mint, oregano. A magnet on the wall holds a collection of old but good-quality knives, a pair of kitchen scissors, a cleaver. The blood is heavy in concentrated areas, caused by blunt force, not a spray from gunshot. From the amount on the walls, she imagines a head wound. From the floor, maybe a stabbing. The cleanup is sloppy and compromised. Whoever was attacked likely fought back.

Kateri glances down the hall to two open bedrooms, a bathroom, and a locked utility closet. She pulls her sweater up over her nose, breathing through the wool, and steps away from the kitchen, eager for fresh air and anxious to call Hurt.

“What’d you find?” he asks.

“A lot of blood,” she says, “but there’s no body inside the house. Looks like a struggle.”

“How fresh?” Hurt asks.

“Sticky,” she says. “With spatter, but not from a gunshot. Looks like blunt force, possible stabbing.”

Kateri’s grandmother died quickly, within four months of her diagnosis. She declined treatment, accepted pain management, and stayed home with Kateri in a hospital bed in the living room, where they watched TV together, her grandmother drinking tea, Kateri whiskey.

When it happened, Kateri leaned her head onto her grandmother’s arm, and she said, “Honey, you have to let me go.”

She left the house for two days while a team from hospice removed all the medical items. She had her grandmother cremated at her request. When her friends called for a memorial service, she couldn’t answer them. She turned her phone off, let the battery die, didn’t return messages. She stayed in, closed the blinds, left the TV going and the bottle open.

When the accident happened, right before Christmas, Kateri herself spent three days in a hospital bed, her arm in a cast and her jaw stitched up. After, she went back to the same rooms, the same TV, and tried to live as she had before, minus the whiskey, minus the woman who’d raised her, minus even the husband she’d held on to for a few short years in her youth.

The yellow walls, the plaid furniture, her grandmother’s things, an owl figurine, a sprawling spider plant, told her it was time to go. Time to sell, to let new, different life into the house. She lit a candle, barely believing, but asked her grandmother to send her a sign.

The next day, the sheriff offered her a transfer from Onondaga County out to tiny, rural Hamilton County. They’d had a criminal investigator retire. At best, it was a lateral move.

“I’m not terminating you,” the sheriff said.

It still felt like an ending.

Kateri asks for backup and a full forensics team, who come in hazmat suits with bright lights and packets of baggies to gather evidence. She looks into each of the rooms, one packed with clutter, clothing, books, candles. There’s a half-blackened sage stick beside the bed and a long cord with brass bells hanging in the window.