Free The Guilty Plea by Robert Rotenberg Page B

and curled around, with space for three or four cars, level with the back. To the right was a manicured lawn. Instead of a fence, there was a row of mature cedars planted quite far apart. A well-worn footpath led through the trees to the neighbor’s back door.
    “Is one knife missing.” Zeilinski nodded toward the woodblock knife holder on the counter.
    “I noticed that this morning,” Greene said.
    “Is maybe one towel missing also.” She pointed to the stove handle, where there were two green-and-white towels, but only a single red-and-white one.
    “Is one missing,” he said.
    “And here.” She led them back through the door frame between the kitchen and the front hall. “Is contact stain. One hundred forty-seven point thirty-two centimeters. Four feet, ten inches from ground.”
    Greene looked at Kennicott. A contact stain was usually from someone’s hand. Probably the perpetrator fleeing the scene.
    “More blood.” Now they were on their way out of the kitchen and going up the wide staircase. “Is here, here, here, and here.” Walking up the stairs, she pointed to small droplets on the rails. “And is here.” She brought them into Simon’s room. On the Curious George carpet a label pointed to a small red dot on the man’s yellow hat.
    Greene and Kennicott exchanged glances again. Both were thinking about Simon saying that his mother had come to his room. “Good work,” Greene said as Zeilinski trooped them downstairs.
    Even though she’d been in the warm house all day, the woman looked as if she could keep going for another twelve hours, which she often had to do. Greene had seen identification officers go more than twenty-four hours without a break.
    Her biggest regret in life, she’d told Greene when they’d first met on a case more than a decade ago, was that her parents left Poland when she was twenty-one. “Is five years before, and I not have this accent.”
    “Bad luck,” Greene had agreed.
    A few years later, when she discovered that Greene was Jewish, Zeilinski was eager to set the record straight.
    “Is no Nazi, my family,” she’d told him.
    “Many Polish Christians helped Polish Jews,” he said. “Three different families hid my father.”
    “Is in Auschwitz, my father, whole war. First transport. Was political prisoner. Number four hundred and fifty-one. Name in museum in Jerusalem.”
    The last time Greene had been to Israel, some of his mother’s distant relatives—no one was left on his father’s side—took him to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. There was this woman’s father’s name in the special tribute to Righteous Gentiles—Jozef Zeilinski.
    “Now the outside doors.” Zeilinski showed them the front of the house. “This door, no marks, no paint chipped, is no sign forced entry.”
    This was often evidence that the victim knew the killer, or at least voluntarily let the person into his house.
    “Blood,” she said, pointing to the door frame. “Is contact stain.” A labeled tape measure ran up beside it.
    “One hundred twenty-seven centimeters. Four feet, two inches from ground.” It was about the height of the stain on the door frame in the kitchen. Consistent with its being the same person.
    “Back door.” Zeilinski paraded them through the house. “Is sticky.” She grasped the handle and demonstrated how the painted wood door needed a shove to open and a yank to close it. There were no forced entry signs here either.
    At the bottom of the door was another labeled tape measure. Greene couldn’t see any blood.
    “Bend down,” Zeilinski told them.
    They followed her instructions. There was a scuff mark, like something from the sole of a shoe. It was thick on the bottom and thinned as it expanded up, like the Nike swoosh. A wisp of red was just below it.
    “Is blood,” Zeilinski said. “Twenty-five point four centimeters. Ten inches from floor.”
    Follow the blood, it will tell the story, Greene thought. The killer knew the layout of the