The blood trail started at the front door. A light spray covered the wallpaper, so fine that it almost looked like part of the design. Then the spray became a spurt, and finally great arching lines of blood that had dripped down the walls into the baseboards.
Wheldon stepped inside the apartment, mourning the destruction of evidence. The crime scene was the entry itself. Even if he hadn't seen the body--face down in the area where the foyer opened into the living room--he would have been able to tell from the blood that the crime had been committed here.
He could even guess, without examining the body itself, how the wounds occurred: a preliminary stab wound on the left side of the back, into some blood vessels but nothing major; other stab wounds lower, at least one somewhere vital; and the last in a major artery which caused death quite quickly.
The attack started when the victim arrived home and unlocked her apartment door. Her attacker followed her inside, stabbed her, pulled the door closed, and continued to stab until she was dead.
"Is there another way into this place?" he asked the patrolman outside the door.
"Nope." The patrolman was young, his face green. He'd been standing in the hall when Wheldon arrived, arms crossed, as if he were guarding the place. But Wheldon had seen enough rookies to recognize the reaction: the young man was trying to keep his lunch down and look official in the process.
"Who's been through?" Wheldon asked.
"The roommate--she's the one who called--my partner, me, the detectives, and the forensic guys."
Wheldon nodded. "Keep everyone else out until I give permission. And I don't want you guys to leave until we bag your shoes."
"Excuse me?" The patrolman looked at him with a mixture of shock and confusion.
"Your shoes," Wheldon said. "This is the fourth entryway stabbing I've worked on in the last two months. The problem with all of them is that critical evidence gets destroyed from the get-go. I'm making sure that won't happen this time."
)
