Mortal Danger

watching them through a window, someone overwhelmed with lust, enough to break in.
    If Beverly Mauck had been sexually attacked by the killer, the postmortem examination and acid phosphotase and DNA tests could determine that.
    As Benson and Tom Catey moved from room to room, they observed hundreds of articles. They would all be listed on the voice recorder of the video camera. All told, the detectives found six weapons: a .22 Beretta handgun (unloaded but with a fully loaded magazine next to it), a Buck knife, an aluminum baseball bat next to the bed in the master bedroom, a Glock .40-caliber handgun, and two rifles. Why hadn’t Brian Mauck reached for one of them—even the baseball bat—as he went to the door?
    There were drops, smears, one fingerprint in blood, and small pools of blood all over the house. Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien took samples of all of it. They could see that someone had wiped down the light-switch plates with a bloody cloth, making an effort to erase any fingerprints left there.
    There promised to be a lot of physical evidence; the challenge was to connect the most telling evidence to a suspect. In the end, the Pierce County investigators would have 190 separate items of physical evidence, from bedding and blood samples to .22-caliber spent rounds (slugs)and towels with gunshot residue burns to hairs and fibers and DVDs and underwear and apparently untouched ammunition.
    Better to preserve too much than not enough.
    When the forensic investigators lifted the bloodstained blankets and sheets from the entry hall so they could be dried and then tested in the police lab, Ben Benson saw more broom or drag marks beneath them. He caught his breath as he saw tread patterns from shoes in the midst of the streaks. They had come from both a large shoe—surely belonging to a male—and a much smaller shoe. The large print was well defined, with a sharp zigzag pattern; even the worn marks on the sole left a distinct imprint.
    Who had left them there? The best physical evidence is a fingerprint left in blood; the bottom of a shoe in blood is almost as good. Beyond the pattern itself, there are signs of wear, cuts, and damage done by rocks and pebbles.
    Any halfway intelligent killer would know that and throw away the shoes he’d worn as he committed his crime(s).
    Ben Benson was hoping for a dumb murderer, or at least an overconfident one. But he knew that Brian Mauck himself could have left those marks if he’d been wearing shoes when he opened his front door to murder. And if he had lived long enough to walk a few feet through his own life’s fluid.
    But Brian was barefoot. It had to be his killer who left the prints.
    It was close to two in the morning when Benson, the CID investigators, and the forensic criminalists cleared the murder scene. They carried with them innumerable containers and plastic baggies filled with what might be vital evidence, all sealed, dated, and initialed. They’d spent almost twelve hours processing it, and they had learned a great deal—but not enough.
    The death house was locked and CRIME SCENE—DO NOT ENTER tape was posted.
    Deputies would stand by to watch it overnight.

Chapter Two
    Ben Benson and the criminalists were back the next morning—Sunday. This time, in the daylight, they could see vomit in the gravel portion of the driveway.
    That, too, would be tested for DNA.
    Twenty-four hours after Jeff Freitas’s desperate call to 911, they had so far: photos of two shoe prints in blood and what appeared to be a fingerprint on a doorjamb, a fingerprint on the outside of a sliding glass door, some prints Hanson-O’Brien had lifted from a faucet in a bathroom sink, a broken front door, a mound of vomit, a towel that had been used as a silencer, and an initial sense of the makeup of the neighborhood where the Maucks had lived.
    There would be all manner of forensic science tests ahead, autopsies, a canvass of the area for possible witnesses, and a search to determine if anyone had a grudge against the young couple.
    The neighborhood along 70th Avenue East was home to all kinds of people, some well-to-do, some enjoying a comfortable living, and some barely making it. Beverly and Brian Mauck had had two salaries and no children yet;they had intended to take just one more scuba-diving trip to Turks and Caicos before they concentrated on becoming parents. They weren’t rich, but they had enough disposable income to buy all the “toys” that detectives had noted as