Nine

9

The single curving stroke was neat and even.

“Any idea what that’s about?” Marquez asked.

“Not offhand. You find what it was painted with?” Alex asked. “A brush? A cloth? A glove?”

“No, not yet. Looks like a brush, though. The lab’s going to take a sample to see if it’s the victim’s blood.”

“Don’t call him a victim, Marquez,” Ciara said.

“The owners of the house moved out of here over a year ago?” Alex asked quickly, hoping to head off an argument. He turned back toward the body.

“Yes,” Marquez said, “but the coroner doesn’t think the vic-uh, the body’s been here more than a couple of days. Not enough insect progress, and after a while, the body would have pulled apart. It’s already stretched out a little.”

“Blood in the tub is still liquid, though,” Alex said. “After two hot days, wouldn’t it be more congealed?”

“Coroner wondered about that, too. He found a puncture wound here.” Marquez carefully leaned over and pointed with gloved finger to a bruised place on Adrianos’s left arm. “He thinks the killer used an IV anticoagulant.”

Alex grimaced. “Injected something into Adrianos so that he’d bleed to death faster?”

“All guesswork right now, but the coroner says these wounds don’t seem to be all that deep or in vital places. No spray from arterial wounds, for example. But none of these little wounds ever clotted, like they normally would have.”

“So if this drug was used on him, it made him into something like a hemophiliac?” Ciara asked.

“I think so,” Marquez said. “No definite answers until toxicology does some tests.”

“Great,” she said. “Judging by their current backlog, we won’t have a report in my lifetime.”

“It might take weeks,” Alex agreed. “But I think we’ll be able to move this one to the front of the line.”

“Dream on-they’ll know this one is an AVA, and no one will be in a rush.”

AVA-asshole versus asshole. Alex didn’t think she had that right, though. That type of killing wouldn’t have been staged so elaborately-and there could be no doubt that this was a dramatic production. But who was the intended audience?

“You find his clothes anywhere around here?” he asked Marquez.

“No sign of them.”

“You checked the whole house?” Ciara said.

Seeing Marquez bristle at the insult, Alex said, “Don’t jump to conclusions, Ciara-Adrianos could have arrived here in his birthday suit. Maybe we couldn’t find him because he’s been hiding out at a nudist colony.”

“Talk about nothing to hide,” she said, staring pointedly at the dead man’s genitals.

Adrianos had been stripped and bound. The thick rag stuffed in his mouth further distorted his face. His arms were securely tied behind him, and a taut line of black rope extended from there to his ankles, which were also tied together. From there the rope looped from between his ankles into two cleanly cut holes in the ceiling above the tub.

“It’s a rappelling rope,” Alex said as he briefly studied the uppermost knot, a figure eight.

“You think a rock climber did this?” Ciara asked.

Alex hesitated. “Could be.”

“Maybe a sailor,” Marquez said.

“Alex is a climber,” Ciara said. “He knows a rappelling rope when he sees one.”

Marquez looked at Alex, but Alex was looking up at the place where the rope disappeared into the ceiling. “Rope goes up over a beam,” Marquez said. “Wraps around it a few times. The access to the attic is just outside this room, in the hall. I took a look, thinking there might be prints in the dust, but the attic has been vacuumed between here and the access.”

“Vacuumed?” Ciara said in disbelief.

“Yes, vacuumed,” Marquez said. “This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment killing.”

“No shit,” she said. “Brilliant observation.”

Marquez sighed in exasperation, then turned to Brandon and said, “I’ll be out front if you need me, Alex.”

“Nice going, Ciara,” Alex said when Marquez was out of earshot.

“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke.”

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “I could use some air.”