I went through an open doorway at the far end. Office. Desk, a couple of cabinets, cords and wires where a computer and printer, both now missing, had been hooked up. The cabinet and desk drawers were open and there was a scatter of papers over the desk and floor: they’d done their packing in a hurry. I picked up several papers at random for a quick look. Paid customer invoices, paid utility bills, and the like. What was left in the drawers was more of the same. No income records, no bank statements, nothing pertaining to individual or professional finances. No correspondence or anything else of a personal nature.
There was nothing to see in the Canine Customers anteroom. I went from there through the foyer, into a sprawling living room.
Enough daylight filtered in past drawn blinds and shades to let me see without having to put on a light. A lot of money had been spent in furnishing it, but in a haphazard and tasteless way. Heavy antique tables and chairs of different styles, woods, and time periods, a glass-fronted cabinet crammed with gilt-patterned chinaware, heavy floor lamps with fringed crimson shades, an intricately patterned red and blue Oriental carpet that clashed with a couple of big, ugly modernistic paintings hung on two walls.
Here and there were empty spaces marked by dust lines where other, smaller pieces of furniture had stood. A section of a third wall above a secretary desk and next to a closed-off fireplace was bare except for a couple of metal brackets where something large and rectangular had been mounted; its faint outline was also visible when I got up close enough. One of those monster flat-screen TV sets, probably.
Too many items missing for them all to have been included with the boxes and other stuff Chavez had seen the two women loading into the SUV, so they must have been taken away on previous hauls. Told me two things: McManus and Carson had been planning to move out for at least a couple of days but weren’t panicked enough to leave behind the bulk of their easily transportable possessions, and wherever they were hauling the stuff to, whether a permanent or an interim location, had to be relatively close to the city.
In the inner wall was an open doorway that led into a cluttered sitting room. Nothing for me there. And nothing in the kitchen and dining room except more residue of hasty and careless packing. Behind the kitchen at the back of the house was a smallish bedroom, comfortably but not as opulently furnished as the common rooms, with a connecting cubicle that contained a toilet, sink, and tiny stall shower. The room they rented out, likely. The double bed was made, everything clean and in its place, but the bureau and nightstand drawers, the closet, and the bathroom were empty. Nobody living here now. I wondered how long it had been vacant. There was a faint odor of cleaning fluid in the bathroom.
I went back the way I’d come, through the sitting room. Between the carpet there and the one in the living room was a section of hardwood floor. The floor had been waxed recently; I hadn’t paid much attention the first time through, but this time the bottom of one shoe slid a little on the slick surface. That was what made me look down, then stop and look more closely.
There was enough light for me to make out a dark discoloration near the fringed edge of the living-room carpet. I dropped to one knee. Irregular stain like a Rorschach blot where something had seeped into the boards. An abortive effort had been made to scrub it away; you could see the marks left by a brush dipped in abrasive detergent.
Bloodstain?
I got out my penlight, shone the beam close above the stain. Might be blood, but I couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t be sure how long it had been there, either, though it didn’t appear to be very old.
If it was blood, it hadn’t come from a minor wound. A fair amount had leaked onto the floor to soak that deeply into the grain of the wood—the kind of seepage you get from direct or near direct contact with a surface. From a person dead or wounded, for instance, a person stabbed or shot or violently clubbed. Or attacked by a vicious dog.
I climbed the staircase to the second floor. The master bedroom had a massive four-poster bed that had the look of a Victorian antique; the rest of the furniture and adornments were the same expensive mismatches as those downstairs. Discarded articles of clothing were strewn over the bed, another garish Oriential carpet, the closet floor. Different sizes, different tastes as near as I could tell, indicating that McManus and Carson had shared this room. I quick-searched drawers and shelves. Nothing but minor leavings.
The medicine cabinet in the adjacent blue-tiled bathroom was open, the shelves mostly empty. Broken glass and spilled liquid from a dropped and broken bottle of nail polish marred the white porcelain sink; the splashes of polish were the color of fresh blood.