"All right, fellas, I've got my first odd sock." The detective's approach to a crime scene, even one in this much disarray, was to simplify her field of view. She pared everything down to getting inside the logic of the life that was lived in that space and using that empathy to spot inconsistencies, the small thing that didn't fit the pattern. The odd sock.

Raley and Ochoa came across the room to join her. Rook adjusted his position at the perimeter to follow quietly from a distance. "Whatcha got?" asked Ochoa.

"Work space. Busy work space, right? Big newspaper columnist. Pens everywhere, pencils, custom notepads and stationery. Box of Kleenex. Look at this beside her here." She stepped carefully around the body, still cast backward in the office chair. "A typewriter, for God's sake. Magazines and newspapers with clippings snipped out of them, right? All that stuff makes lots of what?"

"Work," said Raley.

"Trash," said Rook, and Heat's two detectives turned slightly his way and then back to Heat, unwilling to acknowledge him as part of this exchange. Like his season pass had expired.

"Correct," she continued, more focused on where she was going than on Rook now. "What's with the wastebasket?"

Raley shrugged. "It's right there. Tipped, but there it is."

"It's empty," said Ochoa.

"Right. And with all the tossing this room took, you'd think, OK, maybe it spilled out." She crouched near it and they went with her. "No clips, snips, Kleenex, or crumpled paper anywhere around it."

"Maybe she emptied it," said Ochoa.

"Maybe she did. But look over there." She side-nodded to the armoire that the columnist had used as a supply closet. It had been rifled, too. And among the contents scattered on the floor was, "A box of waste-can liners. Simplehuman, sized for this can."

"No liner in this can," said Raley. "And no liner on the floor. An odd sock."