“Ladies,” he said. “Come in. You have anything you want me to guide you towards?”
Zoe shook her head. “We will take a look at everything in turn.”
The sheriff shrugged his broad shoulders. “All right. Well, I’ll be out in the backyard. We’ve marked out the scene there for you.”
“I’ll come with you,” Shelley volunteered, stepping forward. “Best that we take a look now so you can get back to your office and some shade. Doesn’t do any good to be standing around in this weather.”
Zoe hesitated, holding back. The thought of going back out there again so soon made her want to scream. The heat felt like it was pushing her skull tighter together, crushing all the brain cells inside it. “Maybe we should wait,” she suggested, knowing even as she did that she had no logical excuse to follow it up with.
Shelley turned, giving her a quick smile. “Don’t worry. You stay inside and take a look around. I know you’re uncomfortable out there. We can swap later when you’ve cooled down a bit. For now, you try and think like me and I’ll try and think like you. Might be fun.”
“You don’t mind the heat yourself?” the sheriff asked conversationally, leading Shelley back out toward an open kitchen area flooded with light from the windows facing the backyard.
“Not at all. I’m an Arizona gal,” Shelley replied. After that, the door closed behind them, and Zoe was left alone in the cool and the quiet.
She waited a moment, holding her hands against her temples, pushing the heels of her palms down. She needed to get a grip. She took a few brief moments just to breathe, counting her exhales, taking herself away to the paradise island that Dr. Monk had helped her to build as a mental refuge. It was warm there, not oppressively hot. When she opened her eyes again, she felt clearer, more ready to think.
The house was neatly kept. Zoe looked around and saw nothing out of place: no dirty dishes in the sink, no clothes waiting to go into the laundry. The magazines on the coffee table were arranged by size and aligned precisely at their bottom right corners in an orderly pile. Think like Shelley, she told herself: the owner of the home was fastidious, house-proud, liked things to be clean and tidy.
More than that: nothing was out of place, which meant there was no struggle here. Nothing knocked aside by accident.
She might have considered the possibility that it was the killer who had tidied up to remove evidence, but the whole home was the same on both floors. There was one place in the bathroom where something looked newly removed: a faint patch of discoloration on a shelf, the white-painted wood slightly more yellow in one spot, perhaps where something had stood for a long time until recently. There was no sign of struggle there, though, and no sign of other disturbance. With the other valuables in the house still on proud display, Zoe couldn’t imagine it had been stolen. More likely, the victim had thrown away or moved a knickknack a short while before her death.
In the victim’s bedroom, Zoe found her pajamas folded into a neat square on the covers. She let her hand stray out and touch the soft cotton for a moment, well-washed to the point of comfort. Michelle Young, whoever she was, liked things to always be in their right places.
She had chosen her décor and furniture with the same approach. Absolutely everything that could be oak was oak, with the same tone in the wood, the same treatment. Each room had its own color scheme: pale pink in the bedroom, pale blue in the bathroom, sunny yellow through the hallways to match the front door, green in the living room. The kitchen was silver, from the tiles on the floor that had a pale, creamy quality to the stainless steel appliances and the handles of knives and pans hung from hooks on the wall.
Zoe examined the hooks closely, looking for a telltale sign that something was missing. All of the spaces appeared to be filled. It would have been too convenient, she thought, if the killer had taken Michelle Young’s butcher knife and cut off her head with it.
She glanced out the window, to where Shelley and the sheriff were standing around a rectangle of yellow hazard tape pegged out with metal stakes. They were both shaking their heads, looking down at the ground. Zoe could make out a faint red marking and nothing more. Most likely, she thought, exactly the same as they had found at the scene of Lorna Troye’s death. She had already seen the crime scene photos, which were taken when Michelle was still on the ground. Or, what was left of her. The head, of course, still had not turned up.
Zoe scanned the kitchen again. The cupboards and the hooks on the wall were arranged perfectly for someone who was five nine, which, of course, Michelle had been. At her vantage point of one inch taller, Zoe was able to see things from a little higher than the owner—
No, she told herself. Stop thinking of numbers. Think like Shelley. What would Shelley see here? She would be looking for clues about the person who lived here—about how they had lived, how they might have been surprised, why they were chosen as a target. Not their physical attributes.
Zoe paused beside the refrigerator. Though every effort had been taken, the shining steel surfaces took on marks and smudges more easily than the oak wood, especially after having been polished. The handles of each door held a few such marks, as did the broad surface next to them, where five tips of five fingers had pushed them closed. Zoe squinted closer, and saw the signature trace of a few remnants of white powder. Good: the local forensics team had spotted and dusted the prints already.
She moved across to the stove, made of the same material and polished until it shone in the same way. Here, too, were signs of use. A hand smudge on the handle, a circular mark around one of the knobs on the stove where it had been turned on and then off with a trailing thumb. Zoe leaned down to breathe across the surface, watching her breath turn into a cloud of mist across the surface that quickly dissipated. Like that she could not only make out the fingerprints more clearly, but even the lines left by a sponge or cloth the last time it was cleaned.
The dishwasher, too, was the same steel, even from the same manufacturer. But—Zoe leaned closer, until her eyes were only centimeters from the handle of the machine. There wasn’t a mark on it. Perhaps it had not been used since the last cleaning session.
On a whim, Zoe slipped on a pair of evidence gloves and opened the dishwasher, pulling the door away and down. Inside, the machine was bone dry, all of the racks empty. She took a deep sniff of the air inside and smelled nothing. No dishwasher tablets, no cleaning fluid, no old food swept off the plates and gathered inside the filter to slowly rot.
Even for a woman who kept her house clean, that was a little too much.
Shelley and Sheriff Hawthorne were making their way inside as Zoe stood, closing the dishwasher back up. “Is this new?” she asked, directing her question toward the older man.
He screwed up his face for a moment. “Possibly so. I’ve got a deputy back at the station right now combing through her bank records. If it was a new purchase, he’ll flag it up in the report.”
“I’ll give him a call,” Shelley said quickly, pulling out her cell phone. “What’s his name?”
Shelley stepped off to the side a moment, making the call. In the meantime, awkward silence lingered between Zoe and the sheriff.
“If it was new, she did not even get the chance to use it,” Zoe mused, her eyes going to the knives hanging on the wall. And the point was, they were hanging on the wall—clean. Michelle Young couldn’t possibly have had the dishwasher very long if she had no dirty dishes, and yet it hadn’t been used.