At the Scene of the Crime by Dana Stabenow Page B

of him, a flat-screen television and DVD player occupied the top of a dresser. Nearer to him, on the left-hand wall, a double-door closet was closed. After opening it carefully, he pushed back both doors all the way without touching any areas that might contain fingerprints. A wicker laundry hamper stood against the right-hand wall. He used his Mini Maglite to see inside. There were no towels. Where the hell had they gone?
    He knew that someone, probably two people, had showered earlier in the evening. Why weren’t the towels here?
    Hawkins turned away from the closet and let his eyes wander the room as if the towels would suddenly appear before him. He was staring emptily at the bed when he realized a wrinkle stood out on the floral bedspread just where it disappeared beneath the pillows.
    Hawkins was no OCD type who needed everything just so, but the obsessive-compulsive who lived here was. That meant that even this tiny wrinkle, something Yackowski probably would have overlooked if he had even bothered to come into the room, yapped at Hawkins like an angry little dog.
    No way Mrs. Hoff would have been able to tolerate this affront to her neatness.
    Raines appeared in the doorway. “Something’s not right.”
    He looked at her. “What’s not right?”
    “No shell casings.”
    Hawkins considered that. “There have to be. The pistol’s an automatic. The ejected shells are somewhere.”
    “Agreed,” Raines said. “Just not in this apartment.”
    “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

    “Well, they’re not in the room where the crime happened, anyway.”
    “Better,” he said. “You’ve moved the furniture?”
    She nodded.
    “The bodies?”
    Another nod.
    First the towels disappeared, now the shell casings. Some murder-suicide. He still had a hunch about the wrinkle in the bed. “What do you see here?” he said.
    She took in the room for several long moments, before pointing at the closet. “I see the same thing in here that I saw in the rest of the apartment, somebody with serious obsessive-compulsive issues. The hangers all face the same direction. The clothes are divided by her good clothes, her work clothes, and her casual clothes, and within those sections, subdivided by style and color. Everything has a place and everything is in its place.”
    Hawkins nodded. “Anything else?”
    Raines looked around again, Hawkins watching her. Hawkins was about to tell her his theory when she suddenly said, “The bedspread is wrinkled.”
    Smiling, he said, “It sure is.”
    “But what does it mean?”
    Hawkins shrugged. “Maybe something, maybe nothing, but the small out-of-place things can sometimes be the most important. Do you have a forceps with you?”
    Nodding, she pulled the ten-inch stainless steel tool off a loop on her belt and handed it to Hawkins.
    He took it, opened the serrated jaws, got the end of the bedspread between them and locked the jaws, then pulled back, revealing the pink blanket beneath.
    It, too, was wrinkled. Releasing the jaws of the forceps, the bedspread fell away and he repeated the action with the forceps on the blanket and top sheet. Beneath that, on the pink satin bottom sheet, was a wet spot the size of a half-dollar near the middle of the bed.
    “Looks like someone had sex recently,” Raines said.

    “Swab that.”
    But Raines was already moving in, buccal swab at the ready.
    She pushed the swab up out of its protective plastic sleeve and gently wiped it over the spot on the bed. Next, she pulled the paper handle so the swab disappeared back into the sleeve. She snapped the small lid on it, then held it carefully as she handed Hawkins a roll of an adhesive tag from her pocket.
    Using his Sharpie, Hawkins dated the tag, initialed it, then pulled off the backing and handed it to Raines, who placed it over the lid of the swab sleeve, sealing it.
    “What have we got?” Hawkins asked.
    Raines took a deep breath, then let it out. Holding up the swab, she said, “We have