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stairs to the apartment and entered the small bedroom on the left.
    “Would you verify that this is not the condition the unit was in when they moved in?”
    She did.
    “Is it normally kept in such disarray?”
    “I don’t think so.” She said the maintenance man would know better than she would. “He may have been in the apartment since I was. And he may know which vehicle belongs to Chris.”
    “Would you call the maintenance man and have him respond to our location?”
    Trevino said she would. Everyone exited the apartment, and the detectives closed the door, securing it with yellow crime tape. Sergeant Gage requested a crime lab technician.
    At one in the morning, Technicians Tracy Hill and Dolly Day were paged.
     
     
    While waiting for Hill and Day, Gage and Mancias began questioning the neighboring tenants. Allen Cooper, who lived in the apartment that shared a common wall with the murder site, hadn’t heard a thing. Most neighbors hadn’t.
    But tenant Aaron Green had heard “two pops” late one night, one night during the middle of the week.
    “Could you be more specific about the time of day?” said Gage.
    Green couldn’t. “The sound of gunfire isn’t uncommon around here, so I didn’t give it much thought,” he replied. “But I was asleep when I heard it.”
    Another neighbor, Mario Ybarra, told Mancias that Wednesday morning, around midnight or one o’clock, he had been awakened by something that sounded like a gunshot, one gunshot. Ybarra had waited. He’d listened. He hadn’t heard anything else, so he’d gone back to sleep.
    Maintenance man Rex Dorsett arrived. He couldn’t tell Sergeant Gage which vehicle belonged to Hatton, but he could tell him that neither truck was currently parked in the lot.
     
     
    Around 2 A.M ., Gage requested the blood splatter knowledge of Detective Tommy Wooley.
    Fifteen minutes later, Hill and Day arrived, armed with still and video cameras. They entered the apartment with Mancias, Gage, and maintenance man Dorsett. He verified the apartment was not usually in this state of disarray and left.
    The detectives showed Hill and Day what needed to be photographed. As Hill photographed the living room, Mancias watched from outside. He noticed a waist-high blood smear on the front door frame and pointed it out to Gage and Hill.
    Hill finished photographing the living room, so Mancias reentered it to take a better look. A TV and VCR sat on a stand against the living room wall. Nearby lay a stack of magazines with Soldier of Fortune on top.
    Hill photographed the kitchen, the countertops, the stove, the floor, the overflowing trash cans. The countertops were a mess—a Halloween decoration sat on one, a Dr Pepper three-liter bottle sat on another. Christmas cards hung along one of the dividing walls/counter.
    Mancias walked to the rear of the apartment. He stared at the huge bloodstain on the aquamarine-colored carpet of the smaller bedroom. The red blood on aquamarine carpet mixed to a near black in the stain’s most soaked center. On its outer edges, the blood looked more like a large, spilled can of Hawaiian Punch.
    Mancias stared at the walls and the fast, sloppy, unfinished paint job. It was obvious that blood would be splashed between the two white paints—one flat, one semigloss—like spaghetti sauce between two slices of bread.
    Mancias focused his attention on the headboard, which was turned on its side but still attached to the bed frame, then on the closet door. A paper nametag with Chris Hatton written in bold black ink was stuck to the door frame.
    Detective Tommy Wooley arrived and looked at the blood-splattered bedroom while Hill photographed the dining area, the items on the dining room floor, and a closet in the dining area.
    She began to move to the bedrooms when she overheard Mancias and Wooley talking. “Do you think we should get a search warrant?” said Wooley. They decided they should. Hill ceased photographing the apartment.
    Wooley and