Everything pointed to Li Li Qiao. It was her husband splattered across the kitchen floor, her fat, wet thumbprint on the hilt of the blade that lay next to him, and her blood-caked size 12 boots that had traipsed tremulously out the door not long after the crime was committed.
Her associates backed it all up: a chat with the neighbors revealed she’d been seen emerging from the apartment in a state of visible distress around 7pm, smack-bang in the middle of the period that my cursory field forensics told me was the time the murder took place. When I visited her office, I was told she failed to turn up to work the next day, and she hadn’t returned since.
One coworker said they’d seen her haunting a nearby bar, though, and after quietly breaking into its security room via a well-placed