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bloodstain. The other three would set to work momentarily, snapping photos and bagging evidence. Delgado figured he’d better get out of their way.
    Carefully he retraced his steps, backing away from the corpse. On the steps outside, Nason and Gray stood waiting.
    “Let’s see the window,” Delgado said tersely.
    The two men nodded. Wordlessly they led him down a hallway adjacent to the living room, into a large and well-kept kitchen.
    The lights were off, and Delgado left them that way. The wall switch would not be touched until it had been dusted. Wan daylight, filtering through the window curtains, provided some feeble illumination.
    Looking around intently, Delgado saw a linoleum floor of indeterminate color, perhaps blue or gray—a built-in electric range—a stainless steel sink piled with last night’s dinner dishes—white steel wall cabinets, charmlessly functional. In one corner a black-paneled side-by-side refrigerator hummed tunelessly to itself; a grocery list was pinned to the door by a magnet in the shape of a saguaro cactus. The saguaro grew almost exclusively in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and Delgado was willing to bet that Elizabeth Osborn either had recently visited Arizona or had grown up there.
    He stepped up to the kitchen window and carefully parted the curtains. The glass had been removed, leaving only a few jagged shards clinging to the frame.
    Directly beneath the window there was a dining nook; a three-sided upholstered bench bracketed a small oak-veneer table. A scatter of shining glass fragments dusted the table, the bench, and the floor, but not enough glass to have filled the frame. Delgado turned inquiringly to Nason and Gray.
    “Used tape,” Gray said, answering the unspoken question. “Love tap with a blunt instrument. Neatly done.”
    Delgado nodded. With strips of tape covering the window, the glass would not have spilled noisily out of the frame even after a soft blow had shattered it.
    “Did you find the tape and the glass?” he asked.
    “Yeah. He dropped it right outside the window. In a flower bed.”
    Delgado nodded. “It’s the first time he’s tried this method.”
    “He keeps it interesting,” Nason said.
    “Too interesting,”
    The Gryphon’s single break-in prior to tonight’s job had been accomplished by picking the lock. He’d sprung a standard latch bolt, apparently by using a loid of some kind—perhaps a credit card or a homemade tool.
    Delgado returned his attention to the bench. He saw a few crumbs of dark soil scattered on the tan vinyl upholstery. The killer must have planted his foot on the bench after climbing through the window. Lowering his gaze, Delgado spotted similar specks of dirt on the floor near the table. Perhaps two feet away, there were another few crumbs.
    For the first time since entering the house, he smiled.
    “I think he’s given us some help this time,” Delgado said softly, speaking more to himself than to the others.
    “What do you mean?” Nason asked.
    “He tracked dirt into the room. See it? There ... and there ... and there.”
    “Yeah. From the flower bed. But he didn’t leave any footprints as far as I can see.”
    “True. But if we measure the distance between tracks, we’ll know the approximate length of his step. From that, we can arrive at an estimate of his height.”
    “Shit,” Nason said. “That might work.”
    “Retrace your steps carefully,” Delgado ordered.
    Walking backward, the three men returned to the kitchen doorway.
    “No one enters this room again until SID has photographed and measured those tracks,” Delgado said. “Tell Frommer to make it his first priority once the living room is taken care of.”
    “Right.” Gray hurried off to convey the orders.
    Delgado was still smiling. “He can make mistakes, it seems. Small ones. But those are the ones that will do him in.”
    From outside the house rose a loud male voice shouting questions at the beat cops positioned around the cordon. A