JUNIE MOON’S PAINTED LADY looked tired and dull that afternoon as the sky darkened and a fine rain swept the city. Conklin lifted up the crime scene tape that was strung across Junie’s front door and I ducked under it, signed the log, and entered the same room where Conklin and I had interviewed the fetching young prostitute late the night before.

This time we had a search warrant.

The sound of hammers slamming into ceramic tile led us to the bathroom on the second floor, where CSIs were tearing up the floors and walls in order to get to the bathtub plumbing. Charlie Clapper, head of our CSU, was standing in the hallway outside the bathroom door. He was wearing one of his two dozen nearly identical herringbone jackets, his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, and his lined face was somber.

“Curb your expectations, Lindsay. There’s enough splooge in this whorehouse to tie up the lab for a year.”

“We just need one hair,” I said. “One drop of Michael Campion’s blood.”

“And I’d like to see Venice before it sinks into the sea. And as long as we’re wishing on stars here, I’m still pining for a Rolls Silver Cloud.”

There was a leaden sound as the CSI working behind and under the tub dismantled the trap. As the tech bagged the plumbing, Conklin and I went back to Junie’s bedroom.

It wasn’t the pigpen Ricky Malcolm slept in, but Junie wasn’t a tidy homemaker either. There were dust balls under the furniture, the mirrored walls were smudged, and the dense gray carpet had the oily look of a floor mat in a single dad’s minivan.

A CSI asked if we were ready, then closed the curtains and shut off the overhead light. She waved the wand end of the Omnichrome 1000 in a side-to-side pattern across the bedspread, carpet, and walls, each pass of her wand showing up pale blue splotches indicating semen stains everywhere. She shot me a look and said, “If the johns saw this, they’d never take off their clothes in this girl’s house, guaranteed.”