Free Progeny by E. H. Reinhard Page A

closed the door at his back. His eyes darted around the room. “I don’t even know where to start,” he said.
    I nodded toward the clothes in the corner. “Bloody clothes. Get them bagged and tagged. Check for a wallet. We need to see if this is, in fact, the homeowner.”
    Rick continued staring at the body strung from the ceiling. “Um, yeah, okay.” He set his kit down on the floor and opened the top. He gloved up and examined the pile of clothes. After a moment, he scooped up what had originally been a light-blue polo shirt and held it up by the shoulder seams to examine it. Then he walked to the body hanging from the ceiling and examined the man’s neck. “Throat was slashed while he was sitting upright,” Rick said.
    “That’s what the blood on the shirt says?” Hank asked.
    “Correct.” He switched hands with the shirt and held it toward us. “Blood from the neckline down, some spatter on the shoulders. The right sleeve and side of the shirt are covered in blood. I’d say he fell to the ground in his own blood pool on his right side.” He grabbed a plastic evidence bag from his kit and stuffed the shirt down inside. He sealed the top, placed it next to his kit, and pulled a few more plastic bags from inside.
    He bagged the man’s shoes, socks and boxer shorts, and then the khaki slacks were all that remained. He lifted them up by the belt loops. “Heavy,” he said. Rick lay them flat on the garage floor and went through the pockets. “I got a wallet.” He reached into the pocket and removed it. He flipped it open and eyeballed the driver’s license. “Herb LaSalle.” He looked over at the hanging body. “Height and weight are about right.” Rick bagged the pants and the wallet. “I’m going to give the rest of the garage here a good look. Pax is going to meet me here in a little bit. He was heading back to the station with some items from the assisted-living place.”
    “I wanted him to get going on the prints and DNA samples from that stuff,” I said.
    “Rob is back at the lab. He’s going to start in on that. I called Pax as soon as I saw all the blood in the walkway. This is going to be a two-man job.”
    “Okay, as long as someone is working on the other stuff,” I said.
    “Rob will get it taken care of,” Rick said.
    I looked at Gillison. “Let’s leave him to it. You want to show us the kitchen?”
    “Yeah, come on.” Gillison gave us a wave and walked toward the door.
    We followed him back through the house, minding the bloody drag marks. As I stared down at them as we walked, I saw what looked like a heel print from a shoe and stopped.
    “Hank,” I said, pointing at the mark in the blood.
    He crouched and looked. “Heel. It’s small.” A look of confusion crossed his face. “And thin. A woman?”

Chapter 14
    We spent another two hours on the scene before heading back to the station. Rick and Pax went over the drag marks and photographed and fingerprinted the entire home—kitchen to garage. The Pasco County coroner, along with his team, lowered the victim and removed him from the garage. Rick and Pax collected the equipment used to hoist him and brought it back to our lab. I spoke with the housekeeper that had called it in. She had spoken with LaSalle the prior afternoon. We cross-checked the heel print in the blood against the shoes she wore. They were not a match, and the size wasn’t close. The heel print belonged to our attacker. The coroner put our time of death between fifteen and twenty hours before. The man had been murdered sometime the previous evening.
    Hank and I walked into the station and went straight to Bostok’s office.
    The captain sat at his desk with his arms crossed over his chest. “Same?” he asked.
    “Same.”
    He flung his pen on top of his desk and rubbed his eyes. “Any evidence?”
    “Forensics gathered some things,” I said.
    “What about the assisted-living place?”
    “We found an inhaler that belonged to the man out in the