In the other bedroom, there’s a twin mattress on the floor, boys’ sneakers and a flannel shirt, a stack of cracked-spined paperback books next to the pillow.

“House belongs to Pearl Jenkins,” Hurt says in the hallway, where they stand side by side in regular clothes while a bevy of suited forensic technicians work around them. “But it was recently transferred to her son, Shannon,” he adds.

“Why?” Kateri asks. She knows that any transfer of property, like any large life insurance policy, is never a great sign. At the least it signals money trouble. The worst, coercion.

“The house was about to be seized for back taxes,” Hurt says. “I’m sure it was a work-around.”

“How old is the son?” She watches Hurt as he watches the quad screen of surveillance.

“Let’s pull footage from this,” he says to a tech. “He’s an adult,” he tells Kateri.

“With a record?” Kateri asks.

“Not the kid; just the dad,” he says. “Park Jenkins was put away for years.”

“For?” she asks.

“Arson,” Hurt says.

Behind him, two techs pull samples from the blood and snap pictures of the spatter on the walls, the cabinet doors, the ceiling. They have pulled all the knives and bagged them. They begin opening drawers, careful not to disturb but looking for more evidence of a weapon. It would have to be a heavy object to cause that trajectory of spray.

“Detective Hurt,” one of them says.

Between the potted herbs, another tech finds a single molar, a tiny bit of dried gum still clinging to the soft curve of exposed root.

“Bag it,” Kateri says. “There’s our ID.”

She watches as they pick up the tooth with tiny surgical tweezers and place it in a bag. Behind them, investigators comb through the bedrooms, bagging clothing, hairs, dusting for fingerprints, shining bright lights into dark corners, revealing mouse turds and cobwebs.

“Ma’am,” a tech calls, her voice sharp and panicked. “Ma’am.”

Kateri thinks, here it is. They’ve found the body, or what’s left of it.

The only female tech on the forensic team stands at the utility closet door, a heavy lock cutter in one hand, the other on the doorknob.

Kateri meets her eye before she pulls the door open, bracing herself for the worst: A dismembered corpse, hacked into pieces. A trash bag filled with parts. More blood.

But what she sees isn’t in pieces, or dead at all.

A small girl sits in a pink beanbag chair. The closet is empty except for her and the cushion. She has her knees bent up under her chin and her hands clamped over her eyes. Her hair is a mess of fire-red curls, her clothes spattered with more blood.

On the wall at the back of the closet is a stick-figure man, the kind a kid draws but out of proportion, his arms and legs too long and creepy, his body in black crayon. His eyes in the middle of his big circle head are bright blue, and his mouth is painted on in dried blood.