3. The Missing Weapon

The house was transformed into a crime scene within the hour. Forensic teams swarmed the bathroom like white-clad locusts, photographing the blood spatter, bagging the sponges, measuring the temperature of the water.

Sarah was gone. They had zipped her into a black bag and wheeled her past her weeping neighbors.

The “suicide” theory was already falling apart to the trained eye—the angles were wrong, the defensive wounds on her palms were faint but present, and the cleanup attempt was far too extensive for a grieving husband in the throes of panic. You don’t scrub the grout with bleach while your wife is bleeding out; you apply pressure.

However, Dr. Richard Sterling remained composed. He sat in the living room, wrapped in a foil emergency blanket, sipping a glass of water an officer had given him. He was playing the part of the traumatized spouse to perfection.

“She battled depression for years,” Richard told me, shaking his head, tears welling in his eyes on command. “Postpartum that never really went away. I came home and found her. I panicked. I tried to perform field surgery… to clamp the vessels. I’m a surgeon, Detective Vance. It’s my instinct to cut, to fix. I wasn’t disposing of her; I was trying to find the source of the bleed.”

I stood over him, my arms crossed. I wasn’t buying a word of it. But there was a problem. A massive, glaring problem that could sink the entire case.

“We can’t find the weapon,” Sergeant Miller whispered to me, pulling me into the kitchen. “We’ve turned the bathroom upside down. We checked the toilet tank, the vents, under the sink. Nothing. The cuts on the victim… they are precise. Surgical. But there isn’t a knife, a razor, or a scalpel anywhere in the house.”

I cursed under my breath. “He hid it.”