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Upon reaching the landing, I saw three closed doors down a hallway to the right.  A set of double doors stood open to the left, leading to the master bedroom.  I moved left, deciding to see the worst of it first.
    I hesitated at the bedroom doorway, hair rising on the back of my neck.  Murky light from the street filtered in through closed drapes, illuminating the large room in shades of gray.  A man and a woman lay side by side on a king-sized bed, their eyes staring up with the unmistakable finality of death.  Wraps of elastic bandages covered their mouths.  Blood-soaked blankets hid their bodies from their necks down.  More crimson smears marked the headboard; a dark pool of blood had congealed on the carpet.
    I’ve worked homicides for a major part of my years on the Force.  With few exceptions, most murders I’ve encountered have been simple, garden variety killings:  drive-bys, domestic fights that escalated to a fatality, drug-related deaths, and so forth.  Stupid, ugly, cruel and occasionally brutal crimes—but at least on some level understandable.  “That fat bastard left the toilet seat up one time too many.”  Like that.  I knew this was different.  Whoever had done this had taken his time.  And he’d liked it.
    Anyone who confronts gruesome realities on a regular basis eventually develops a method of coping.  Mine is to shut off emotions I can’t afford to feel and concentrate on the forensic details of the crime.  And that’s what I did now.  Taking a deep breath, I entered the bedroom.
    With the exception of the bodies, the room appeared undisturbed, with no sign of a struggle.  The extinguished stumps of several candles were visible throughout—one on the dresser, another on a chest of drawers, a third on the nightstand beside a small black knife.  Blood covered the knife blade.  The adjacent candle, in its dying throes, had partially immersed the handle in wax.
    As I moved into the room, I noticed a wet spot on the carpet, an oval stain the size of a watermelon.  Though a spattering of blood surrounded it, another liquid appeared to have caused the main area of dampness.
    Urine?  Have SID get a sample, along with the blood.
    Drag marks on the rug led from the stain to the bed.  I knelt to examine them, surmising that one or possibly both of the Larsons had been moved, either before or after they’d been killed.
    Was the killer compulsively neat?  Or was he trying to hide something?
    I moved farther into the room.  As I approached the bed, I noted that someone had stepped in the blood-puddle near the woman, explaining the tracks on the carpet and stairs.  Again I withdrew my camera and took shots of the bloody footprints, then moved closer.  Not touching the bed, I leaned over.  The man, a muscular individual in his early thirties, stared back, his eyes red rimmed and unseeing.  A lattice of petechial lesions—burst blood vessels indicative of strangulation—mottled his cheeks and the conjunctivae of his eyes.  I raised the comforter.  A loop of rope encircled the man’s neck.  A two-foot length of galvanized pipe had been inserted through the rope coil as a tightening device.  Again, I inspected the man’s face.
    Something wrong with his eyes …
    Thick, hemorrhagic crusts rimmed the man’s orbits.  I leaned closer.  Abruptly, I realized what was wrong.
    Charles Larson had no eyelids.
    I glanced at the knife on the nightstand.  Too big.  Must’ve used something smaller.  A pocket knife?  Scissors?  All at once I saw something I’d missed earlier.  In the wax beside the knife, curling like pork rinds, were the man’s missing pieces of flesh.
    With a chill, I resumed my inspection.  Gently folding back the covers, I saw that the man’s arms had been bound behind his back.  A ligature mark from a rope or something similar traversed his chest.  Visible beneath the outer edge of one shoulder, a port-wine staining of the skin—caused by blood settling