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had a boyfriend?”
    Dane shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It was just some-thing the lieutenant said, about this being sick. It is. And that makes me real uneasy. Come on, let’s see if we can figure out how he got in.”
    It didn’t take long. There was a small cut at the bottom of the screen on the window in the spare bedroom. The screen was in place but unfastened, and the latch on the window was open, not that it would have kept out even a determined ten-year-old. “I’ll get Ivan,” Trammell said. “Maybe he can lift a print, or find a couple of stray threads.”
    Dane’s gut feeling was getting worse. A forced entry put a different slant on the situation, indicating a stranger. This didn’t feel like a burglary that had escalated into violence when the intruder had been suddenly confronted by Mrs. Vinick. The ordinary burglar would have been more likely to run, and even if he had attacked, it would have been quick. The attack on Mrs. Vinick had been both vicious and prolonged. Sick.
    He walked back into the kitchen. Had the first confronta-tion taken place here, or had Mrs. Vinick seen the intruder and tried to run out the back door, getting as far as the kitchen before he caught her? Dane stared at the appliances as if they could tell tales. A small frown knit his brows and he went over to the automatic coffee maker, the kind that was installed under the upper cabinets so it didn’t take up counter space. The carafe held about five cups of coffee. Using the backs of his fingers, he touched the glass. It was cold. The coffee maker was the kind with the automatic switch that turned off the warming plate after two hours. A coffee mug, filled almost to the rim with coffee, sat on the counter. It didn’t look as if it had been touched since the coffee had been poured into it. He stuck his finger into the dark liquid. Cold. He pulled a pair of surgical gloves out of his pocket and put them on. Carefully touching only the wooden rim of the cabinet doors rather than the metal handles, he began opening them. The second door revealed a canister of decaffeinated coffee. Mrs. Vinick could drink it late at night without worrying about her sleep being disturbed.
    She had made a pot of coffee and she had been in here, in the kitchen. She had just poured the first cup and replaced the carafe on the warming plate. The door from the living room was behind her and to the right. Dane went through the motions as if he had just poured the coffee himself, standing where she would have stood. According to the placement of the cup on the counter, she would have been standing slightly to the left of the coffee maker. That was when she had seen the intruder, just as she had set the carafe in place. The coffee maker had a dark, shiny surface, almost mirror like, behind the hands of the built-in clock. Dane bent his knees, trying to lower himself to Mrs. Vinick’s general height. The open doorway was reflected in the surface of the coffee maker.
    She had never even picked up her cup of fresh coffee. She had seen the intruder’s reflection and turned, perhaps thinking, in that first moment, that her husband had forgot-ten something and returned home to get it. By the time she had realized her mistake, he had been on her. She probably hadn’t been standing naked in her kitchen, though Dane had been a cop long enough to know that anything was possible. It was just another gut feeling. But she had been naked when the killer had finished with her, and probably naked when he had started.
    The odds were that she had been raped at knife point, right here in the kitchen. The lack of obvious semen didn’t mean anything; after so many hours, and with the struggle that had gone on, it would take a medical examiner to make a judgment. And a lot of times, rapists didn’t climax anyway. Orgasm wasn’t the point of rape.
    After the rape, he had started work with the knife. Until then, she had been terrified but hoping, probably, that when he was