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Oh, fuck.

“I’ll go look,” I told him. Because the expression on his face clearly told me he didn’t want to go anywhere near that office.

I knew where I was going, and I followed the exterior hallway with its floor-to-ceiling windows to Gregory Crane’s office, which was surrounded on three sides by similar windows. The whole house was like that—the interior of the house had a courtyard with a garden of its own—that one had all of the toxic plants: foxglove, nightshade, hemlock, and so on. That way no one could accidentally wander into it.

There was more tape on the office door, and I pulled that down, as well, before hesitantly pushing it open.

I expected the room to feel more…different. I should know better, really. I’d worked homicide most of my police career, so I’d been inside probably a hundred rooms in which someone had died. They were just rooms. Empty, cold, sometimes left smelling of death, depending on how messy things had been. I knew the room was just a room that happened to temporarily house a murder victim.

The difference was that Gregory Crane was the first victim I had loved.

I let out a breath, bracing myself before stepping across the threshold.

The office was cool, but that wasn’t surprising. It was winter, and the room had three walls with massive windows. There was a tiny woodstove in the corner that Gregory used for heat when he was working, its stovepipe chimney vented out through the wall in the corner.

I scanned the room, not wanting to touch anything yet, trying to decide if it was worth documenting. The Shawano PD had been in here, the ME had moved the body, and a CSI team had undoubtedly documented the scene, so what the fuck did I think I was going to find?

I took out my phone and started taking pictures anyway. Just in case. In case what, I had no idea. But my camera wasn’t going to miss anything because it was having an emotional breakdown, which was not particularly true of me and was definitely not true of Elliot.

I was working my way around the room, telling myself to move quickly so that I didn’t just fucking leave Elliot alone, but I also wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Which is why I saw the mud.

The Crane family always took their shoes off. It was possible, I suppose, that the mud might have come from Henry, but Henry knew that the Cranes always took their shoes off—and he’d have respected that because he wasn’t expecting anything to be catastrophically wrong. Which meant that it either belonged to some careless-as-fuck cop—although if they were even the tiniest bit competent at their jobs, they’d have checked their shoes for particulates or worn booties.

So it was entirely possible that the mud could have come from Gregory’s killer.

I wondered just how hard it would be to get my hands on the official crime scene photographs—they’d have been taken before anybody with muddy shoes would have been let in the room, so if theyweren’tthere, I could chalk it up to the cops. If theywere… well, then I was going to be calling Mays to ask him about shoe-prints.

I took a couple of close-ups of the mud.

And then I made my way back to the kitchen, where Elliot was going through the fridge.

“Oh. Mom sent food for you,” I told him. I’d left it in the car—it was cold enough that the car would act like a fridge. Or freezer, depending on how long I left it out there.

“Tell her thanks.” He looked up at me, stress pinching his face. “No luck?”

“I, uh, got distracted,” I admitted. “I found mud.”

Elliot is nobody’s fool. “Mud?”

I nodded. “Baggies?”

He pulled out a drawer, and I took out the whole box of baggies. Next to them was a package of wooden kebab sticks, and I pulled out a couple of those, too. That would let me push some of the dirt into the baggie without having to use my hands. Then I dug out some masking tape and a sharpie so I could label the baggie—and anything else I might find.

“Thanks. I’ll, uh, be back in a little while.”

I went back to the office and got to work.

It was easier not to think about the fact that Gregory had died in this room if I focused on the room as a crime scene, letting habit take over.

I got as much dirt from the now-dry muddy shoe print off the carpet and into the baggie as I could. Then I went back to scouring the room.

On the other side of the desk, I found a tiny button. One of those little white ones you use to button down your collar. I’d have to check with Elliot—and look in Gregory’s closet—to see if he had any of those shirts.

The thing that made me think he probably didn’t—aside from the fact that I couldn’t remember ever seeing Gregory Crane wear anything but extremely casual clothes—was that I found it disturbingly close to where there was a rubbed-clean-of-dust section on the beam overhead.

The kind of rubbed-clean you’d get if someone threw a rope around it and then hung something from it that didn’t hold still.