Page 48 of The Turning of the Tables

While not literally over the body, why ARE you texting me at a crime scene?

Because there’s a fight over who gets the body.

So I can’t do anything until they settle it.

Is this a fight you want to win or lose?

Definitely win.

I could use the hourly overtime.

Fingers crossed you get to keep this body, then.

It wasanother twenty minutes before Maza came over and told us we could get back to work. Apparently wehadwon the jurisdictional fight, although us lowly CSIs weren’t generally privy to the details about why. It didn’t really matter, to be honest.

“What do you thinkthatwas about?” Quincy asked me, leaning close.

I shrugged. “We’re close to the county line,” I pointed out. Maza was Richmond City, and while he did sometimes get pulled to cases in other jurisdictions when they had ritual or magical connections—as had Hart before him—if it was a plain old homicide, we still had to play by jurisdictional limitations.

But even though we were on the line, we were definitely on the Richmond side—even if the officer who had called it in wasn’t. He was Henrico County, and we were at a residence about three blocks on the Richmond side of the line—otherwise known as Chippenham Parkway—but because a Henrico officer had been closer, they’d been the first onscene. And that meant that they wanted to claim it as theirs—because everybody wanted the overtime.

The victim was lying on her back in the front doorway—the door was wide open. A neighbor had come over to meet her, found the body, and placed the call. The neighbor in question—a middle-aged white woman with brown hair pulled back into a ponytail who was dressed as though she’d been out for a run or walk—was sitting on the curb, her forehead resting on arms folded over legging-clad legs. Maza was talking to her, also sitting on the curb, and he’d already offered up a handkerchief.

Given the similarity in age between the victim and the neighbor—and their matching windbreaker jackets—it was clear they not only knew each other, but were likely friends. Or at least friendly.

Crime scenes were extra rough when the person who found the victim was a friend or family member. Usually, these were the natural causes deaths—an elderly parent or grandparent, someone who suffered a sudden stroke or heart attack, an accident such as falling down the stairs. Murders, however, tended to be found by strangers—not always, of course. It depended on whether the body was dumped or killed in the home.

This was clearly one of the latter.

Quincy was crouched next to the body, and I was doing the lawn walk, looking for shoe prints that didn’t match the running shoes worn by the woman talking to Maza—anything larger, most likely, given the fact that the victim appeared to have been felled by a single blow to the head with some yet-to-be determined object.

The victim’s friend had clearly seen something wrong and run across the lawn to get to the front door, leaving impressionsin the grass and wet shoe-prints on the cement stoop and the last few squares of the path. Her feet were small—I’d guess around a size five—so it was easy enough to eliminate her… assuming of course that shehadactually discovered the body and not made it, of course. Realistically, I’d have been shocked if she were our killer—usually a dent like that in someone’s skull requires more force than a short, thin woman is capable of making, assuming she wasn’t a shifter. A small shifter can still pack quite a lot of punch—Noah’s one, after all, and while I’d never actuallytriedphysically fighting my brother, I was pretty sure based on other life experiences that he could absolutely clean the floor with me. Taavi was even shorter, and I wouldn’t want to mess with him, either.

So if our friendly neighbor was a shifter, then she could be a suspect, but she didn’t seem to be acting like one to me. Too confident in her own presence. Too immediately trusting. Shifters tend to be cautious around strangers—especially strangers in positions of authority, like cops. I couldn’t say that I blamed them.

Not my job, of course, but if I’d thought she was going to be a legitimate suspect, I’d have paid more attention to her shoe-prints beyond pointing them out to the photographer to document.

Instead, I was looking for something that didn’t belong—dirt that was red or sandy instead of the dark brown of the soil that I could see in the patchy yard across the street; a rock or pebble; a smudge of grass on the sidewalk or a drip of oil on the road where a car would have been parked.

It seemed pretty evident to me that whoever had killed the victim had either knocked on the door or rung the doorbell—and that it was someone for whom she would plausibly have opened the door. Someone she recognized and trusted enough to open the door to very early in the morning.Or someone who seemed to be trustworthy, like a cop or a utility worker or someone else who would have a legitimate reason to be knocking on doors before eight a.m.

But that wasn’t my job. My job was to find the evidence that would help Maza to figure out who did it and why.

Behind me, Quincy sneezed.

“Bless you!” I said, turning around to look down at her.

“Ugh,” came the response. “Gross.”

“See if I bless you again,” I teased.

“Not you,” she muttered, pulling her disposable mask off. “Ihatewhen I sneeze into these things and then just have snot all squished up against my face.” She sniffed hard, then dug around in one pocket before she pulled another mask out, unwrapping it and putting it back over her face. “Stupid spring allergies.”

I might have chronic Lyme and alpha-gal, but at least my face didn’t explode every spring like Quincy’s did. Yeah, she’d had a mask on, but it takes like twenty minutes for her sinuses to clear out when she puts them on in the spring. We’d had them off while waiting so we could drink our coffee before it got totally cold waiting for us in the cab of the CSI van, and we’d only been back at it for about ten minutes, so she was still sniffly.

“You poor thing,” I said to her, both teasing and sympathetic.

“Go tent some damn spatter,” she grumbled back.