The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King Page B

that same room, the team had found a box of bullets and a can of gun oil. The box was half empty, both it and the can were covered with dust, and the rag draped across the can of oil had not been used in months, possibly years. The bullets were .38s, but they had found no sign of a gun.
    “Maybe he just bought them to pound into the wall,” Kate suggested, holding the evidence envelope up to the light.
    “What?” Crime Scene Maria asked.
    “Nothing.”
    The most promising piece of evidence was the object Kate had spotted between the filing cabinet and the wall: an irregular slip of black porcelain an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide.
    “There were also some tiny splinters of the same material in the carpet under the chair,” Lo-Tec told her. “We’ve got those in the vacuum. Although it looks like they cleaned it up pretty thoroughly—nothing in the trash and the vacuum bag has been emptied.”
    Kate held this evidence bag, too, up to the light and studied the tiny, sharp-sided remnant, seeing the trace of fingerprint powder. “No print?”
    “That would’ve been too lucky.”
    “We can always wish for some blood and hair?”
    “It looks pretty clean, but we’ll see.”
    “Where did you find it?”
    He handed her his characteristically neat sketch of the room: rectangular space, door on the left, chair in front of it facing the television on the right-hand wall, desk and computer wrapping around the upper wall, narrow shelf running the squared U shape at the top of the room, a complete wall of bookshelves along the bottom wall. The hidden scrap of black-glazed porcelain had been lodged behind the filing cabinet immediately to the left of a person coming in the door, directly below the shelf holding the awards. If Gilbert had been watching the television, an assailant could have snatched the statue off the shelf, taken one step forward, and swung it right-handed at the seated man’s head, which in Gilbert’s case would have protruded five or six inches above the top of the chair. His injury had been just behind his temple, indicating that he turned his head as the blow was falling. If the statue had been particularly fragile, pieces of it would have flown in all directions, lodging in Gilbert’s garments and hair, the carpets, and the chair. Most of the bits would have fallen down or continued their trajectory to the left, but the killer might well have kicked one chunk out of sight, in back of the filing cabinet, away from the rest and outside the easy reach of a broom. Even if the statue had been too sturdy to shatter into a thousand pieces, clearly it had broken. They would find traces on Gilbert, and they would find it in the clothing of his assailant.
    And if they found half-healed cuts along the right hand of a suspect, they would know that the assailant had not worn gloves.
    “One last thing,” Lo-Tec told Kate. “We’re taking the hard drive, but there’s one hookup I can’t immediately tell what it goes to. The way it’s set up, it’s like he intended to put a viewer onto the front door that he could check from upstairs, but I can’t see any camera there. The wire runs inside the wall, so it’s tough to trace. I don’t want to bother taking the place apart now, since we’ll find where it goes anyway as soon as we get into the hard drive, but I just thought I’d mention it.”
    “A security camera of some kind?”
    “Nanny-cam, front door viewer, webcam, no telling. I’d normally leave the hard drive for our computer guys, but if you think it’s important I’ll open it up myself and see what I can find. Might take a while.”
    “How long have you been on?”
    “Nine hours. Twelve yesterday.”
    “It’s Sunday afternoon, man. Go home, it’ll wait.”
    “Okay, but if you see a camera lens poking out of somewhere, let us know.”
    “And if you find a video of someone bashing our guy, don’t hesitate to call.”
    There were no other chunks of black-glazed porcelain, but