Running from the Law by Lisa Scottoline

the house would be able to spot a Jaguar, but would have a harder time identifying its driver with absolute certainty, especially in the downpour we’d had yesterday. I wondered who the witness was. I resolved to visit the owner of the main house as soon as I could.
    I looked back at the carriage house. It stood two stories tall and was almost obscured by the grove of oak trees surrounding it. Its first floor was an ivy-covered garage, and a runner of English ivy over the door told me it hadn’t been opened in a while. Maybe Patricia used the garage for storage. I flashed on the painting she testified about at her deposition, the one of me and Paul. Maybe she kept her canvases in the garage.
    “Can I get a look in the garage, too?” I asked my baby-sitter, Officer Johanssen. Until the police released the crime scene, Lieutenant Dunstan had decreed I’d need an escort to inspect it, even outside. And each visit had to be logged in, recorded.
    “Yes,” Johanssen said.
    We walked past the garage and around to the left, to a slate patio where the front door was tucked under a white trellis covered with purple clematis. The door was in good condition, except that its blue paint was alligatored with age and water. How did the killer get in?
    “The door doesn’t look damaged, does it?” I wondered aloud, intentionally.
    Johanssen said nothing and took a key with a white tag on it from his pocket.
    “Were you one of the officers on the scene, right after the murder?”
    “No.”
    “Have you ever been here before?”
    “No.”
    A buff Viking with a dark tan, the cop would make a terrific sperm donor if the egg brought the personality. He jiggled the key in the lock, pursing his lower lip. If I hadn’t been there, I suspect he would have cursed. Finally the door swung open, revealing an entrance hall furnished simply, with a painted side table and a carved wooden lamp. A set of colored pencils sat on the table next to a stiff spray of dried pink statice.
    “I guess the living quarters are upstairs,” I said.
    “Here are the stairs,” Johanssen said. He walked to the left and I followed.
    The stairway was narrow and uncarpeted. Johanssen trod heavily in his black shoes and the stairs groaned with each footfall. It was easier for me to watch his heels than to look up to the top of the stairs, wondering what I was going to find. Halfway up I had my answer, because of the smell. A smell I remembered from my childhood. I’d grown up with the scent of blood in the butcher shop, but this blood didn’t smell like an animal’s. It smelled different, primitive as menses. The hot air was thick with it. I felt queasy and leaned on the wooden banister.
    Johanssen reached the top of the stairs and looked back over his shoulder. “Miss?”
    “I’m coming.” I swallowed my rising gorge and willed myself to climb higher.
    What I saw at the top of the stairs horrified me. Patricia’s living room, which also served as a studio, had been ransacked. Pencil sketches on white paper lay scattered across the unvarnished hardwood floor. Yellow tracing paper, curled at both edges, was strewn everywhere. A wooden easel had been knocked to the ground; it had a photograph of a meadow taped to it and held a canvas with a similar landscape. The painting had been slashed and there was blood splattered on the tear. Sunlight poured in through Palladian windows, illuminating the room obscenely.
    “My God,” I heard myself say.
    “Remember, don’t touch anything,” Johanssen said. His eyes were focused on the right side of the room and his affect was flat. I followed his gaze.
    A white line was taped to the floor like a Keith Haring outline. It was a jumble of arms and legs, as askew and berserk as the studio itself. No human, no woman, could lie in such a fashion. The neck was twisted back on itself. In the center of the figure, spreading over the hardwood floor, was a thin pool of blood, oddly a bright shade of red. Its primal scent was