Walking into the Ocean by David Whellams

edge. It was clear to Peter that he needed someone like Stan Bracher. Peter also comprehended that the Regional Lab, with three murdered girls in its cooler, was under more pressure than it could handle, and possibly had refused to rush the Anna Lasker results. As far as Peter knew, the Lasker automobile was also languishing in the garage at the lab.
    Peter thought he had the sequence of the battle straight, from lavatory to downstairs corridor, with the destruction in the kitchen a sideshow. But the varying
quantities
of blood stymied him. The pooling was heaviest in the bath, but he was sure that the duel between husband and wife had moved from upstairs to down. He stood in the vestibule on the main floor and pressed himself against the door, hoping to gain a new perspective on the wainscoting of blood. He padded to the kitchen doorway and repeated the process from the reverse perspective. Yes, he was sure that the bloody hand — for now it was a disembodied hand, since he wasn’t sure whether the husband or the wife had painted the walls — had moved from the bottom of the stairs to the back kitchen.
    And then he was sure. Anna Lasker had painted those stains. The preliminary report ruled that it was her blood. But André simply couldn’t have “carried” that much of it down the stairs, nor was he so perverse as to kill her and continually dip his hand into her wounds like a pot of ink. Anna, desperately injured, had resolved to desecrate her home, which should have been her refuge but, as she suddenly knew in her panic, was becoming her coffin. She had passed along the hallway, stopping three times to paw her fingers through her own seeping veins.
    Peter returned to the upper bedroom and gathered the file from the bed. He entered the lavatory once again and stared at the carnage. Despite his conclusions about the source of the blood downstairs, the destruction there remained a mystery. There was simply too much blood. The nylons drooped from the shower bar. The house was silent, and he tried but failed to identify any sounds from the street. Before he could decide what to do next, his phone chimed.
    â€œInspector! There’s a girl who’s seen the Rover. Can you come with me to interview her?” Ron Hamm said.
    â€œHave you already talked to her?”
    â€œYes. Well, no. I’ve talked to the mother.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œShe needs to be approached carefully. The girl. I need your . . . experience.”
    The Rover was supposedly none of Peter’s affair, but he couldn’t resist. Why did he always rise to the bait? Would Maris soon be calling Bartleben and calling him a troublemaker? He sighed, but it was his only hesitation. “Pick me up at the Lasker house. I’ll be ready whenever you get here.”
    He immediately understood that Hamm was taken aback by his quick response, and so he put the query the detective had been expecting. “Does Maris know that we’re doing this?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œLet’s be careful about mixing the two cases,” Peter said.
    â€œInspector?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œSomething was mentioned about Lasker as well.”
    Peter had a few minutes before Hamm was due to pick him up. He was almost sure now that he understood how Anna had haunted her way through the house, certain of the end of her marriage and her life in England. She was with him in the house now, beckoning him to follow. Her ghost gave him permission to take possession of the crime scene; now the house resonated differently. He did a final, lambent tour of the bloodied rooms and corridors to imprint the overall scene on his memory. He made sure that the computer and printer had shut down, and pocketed the yellow sticky notes. Then he waited out front on the stone step. He didn’t care if the residents of the street saw him.
    Ron Hamm drove up no more than five minutes later. The wind along the street had picked