Marlo had answered the call five hours ago and was no closer to going home than when he first arrived. He took one last drag on his cigarette, placed the butt in a cup of cold coffee, then stood and walked back over to the doorway. He looked closley at the crime scene.

The hotel room was in shambles. The cheap furniture had been tossed and broken, the walls were punched with holes and peppered with spots of a dried, brown substance that could only be blood. He had seen a lot of crime scenes but this was one of the worst.

Although the coroner pronounced the victim dead at 4:17 a.m., there had been no real need. Beneath the crushed skull and the matted hair, the mangled remains were obviously void of any signs of life. The pronouncement was clearly a formality. What puzzled Marlo, however, was the absence of a perpetrator. There were no signs of a killer. No fingerprints on the furniture. No footsteps in the cheap, fuzzy carpet. One way in. One way out.

How did the killer escape?