Page 74 of Forever Dead

Miss Marsh would have made a good mother.

She had spent most of her adult life looking after other people's children anyway.

Selena opened the door.

Cold air reached into the car.

The cane came out first. She planted it on the gravel, eased her bad leg around and stood slowly. Her knee throbbed in warning.

"This is a terrible idea."

She said it quietly, then reached across the passenger seat and opened the glove compartment.

A small flashlight lay beneath the vehicle manual. Selena took it, along with a packet of nitrile gloves she had kept in the car long before the injury.

Old habits.

Police tape still stretched from the porch post toward the maple beside the driveway. More had been tied near the rear of the house. The scene had clearly not been released completely.

Selena approached the porch.

Her flashlight crossed the steps, railing, and front door.

Then stopped.

The wood beside the lock was splintered. Selena moved closer. The front door had been forced. She stared at it for several seconds. The original report had been clear. Front door locked. Deadbolt engaged. Security chain secured. Chuck had entered through the broken rear door.

This damage was new.

Selena took out her phone and photographed the door from the foot of the porch. She moved closer and took two more shots of the splintered wood around the lock and the sagging crime-scene tape.

Only then did she pull on the gloves.

The tape near the porch had been stretched enough to sag. She stepped carefully beneath it and climbed the steps, putting most of her weight through the cane.

Fresh pale timber showed around the lock.

Someone had been here since the police processed the house.

Selena touched the door with two fingers. It moved inward. A floorboard creaked somewhere inside. She stopped. Not the house settling. Not with that rhythm. Another step followed. Selena's pulse quickened.

The flashlight beam reached into the hallway. Empty.

Her other hand went instinctively toward her hip and found nothing.

No firearm.

No radio.

She was an injured, temporarily inactive FBI agent standing outside a recently forced murder scene with a flashlight and a cane.

"Brilliant." She felt almost like a rookie in those shadows, making mistakes like that. The truth was, she had felt her procedural skills dulling of late. A consequence of Harlan County pressing in on her, miles from the strict rules of Washington D.C.

Selena lifted the flashlight.

"Hello?"

No answer.