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 neighbours revealed she'd been seen emerging from the apartment in a state of visible distress around 7 pm, 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 (whose address I gleaned from a business card in the purse she'd left on the kitchen counter), I was told she failed to turn up to work the next day, and she hadn't returned since.
