MURDER TUNED IN (Allie Griffin Mysteries Book 4) by Leslie Leigh Page B

answer your question, any rope will get twisted up if enough tension is put on it. Some will milk on you."
                  "Pardon? Did you say milk?"
                  "Yeah." He picked up a specimen of rope and held it before her, pointing out things as he spoke of them. "Each one of these has a core. The rope on the outside is a sheath that gets wrapped around it. You put enough tension on the rope, and the core separates from the sheath. You call that milking. Then it bunches up. You get kinks in it. Not good for certain kinds of rigging, like when you need a clip to slide over a certain area. If there's kinks, the clip'll get stuck."
                  "Interesting. So you can tell probably how old a rope is or how much it's been used by its condition?"
                  "Listen I've been doing this for so long I can tell you different kinds of rope with my eyes closed."
                  Allie brought out her phone and showed Ernie the photo of the evidential piece of rope Beauchenne had gotten for her.               "This, for example."
                  He took the phone in his meaty hands and studied the photo closely. "Yeah, this one's been through the wringer."
                  Allie winced at his unknowing choice of words. She leaned in and looked at the photo with him. "Interesting. How would you tie a rope like this?"
                  "Depends on what you need it for."
                  "Say I needed it to stay tied."
                  "That would be a bowline. It's the most widely used knot. Here." He handed her phone back to her, then took the piece of rope he'd been holding and tied the knot for her like he'd been doing it since birth. "That's a bowline. That will stay tied no matter what."
                  "Can I see that?"
                  "Sure. If you're interested in how they look when they're tied, I'd say it looks like that one in the photo'd been tied  for a long time."
                  "Really?"
                  "Pretty positive."
                  She looked at the knot he'd tied for her, then inspected the rest of the untied rope. On either end was a piece of colored tape wound around it like the plastic at the end of a shoelace.
                  "Why this?"
                  "It's an old stagehand trick. Keeps the ends from fraying. But there's another reason. You put two different colored pieces of tape in order to distinguish one end from another. Safety precaution. You always have to tie these things the same way, and sometimes you're working in the dark."
                  "Really."
                  "Yeah. Right over left, left over right. That's a square knot. You can't tie it any other way. No stagehand would tie it any other way. Same with a bowline. There's a certain way you have to do it."
                  "Huh. That's very interesting," Allie said, looking closely at the rope. She then looked all around the theater at the myriad ropes hanging all around, some suspending weights and balances, some moored to the pin rail, and some performing functions she couldn’t even guess at.
                  She held up the rope he'd tied for her. "Can I hold onto this for a little while?"
                  "Sure thing. Hang on." He reached into his work belt and pulled out a utility knife. This he used to cut the rope cleanly into a two-foot long section. "Want me to tape that up for you?"
                  "Not necessary. Thank you."
                  "Anything else you need, you let me know."
    #
                  "Look closely at this photo." Allie and Del walked to Allie's car and paused in the middle of the almost-empty parking lot.
                  "What am I looking