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This one was different.

The first hint was Milo’s tight-voiced eight a. m. message, stripped of details.

Something I need you to see, Alex. Here’s the address.

An hour later, I was showing I. D. to the uniform guarding the tape. He winced. “Up there, Doctor. ” Pointing to the second story of a sky-blue duplex trimmed in chocolate-brown, he dropped a hand to his Sam Browne belt, as if ready for self-defense.

Nice older building, the classic Cal-Spanish architecture, but the color was wrong. So was the silence of the street, sawhorsed at both ends. Three squad cars and a liver-colored LTD were parked haphazardly across the asphalt. No crime lab vans or coroner’s vehicles had arrived, yet.

I said, “Bad?”

The uniform said, “There’s probably a better word for it but that works. ”

Milo stood on the landing outside the door doing nothing.

No cigar-smoking or jotting in his pad or grumbling orders. Feet planted, arms at his sides, he stared at some faraway galaxy.

His blue nylon windbreaker bounced sunlight at strange angles. His black hair was limp, his pitted face the color and texture of cottage cheese past its prime. A white shirt had wrinkled to crepe. Wheat-colored cords had slipped beneath his paunch. His tie was a sad shred of poly.

He looked as if he’d dressed wearing a blindfold.

As I climbed the stairs, he didn’t acknowledge me.

When I was six steps away, he said, “You made good time.

“Easy traffic. ”

“Sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“Including you. ” He handed me gloves and paper booties.

I held the door for him. He stayed outside.

The woman was at the rear of the apartment’s front room, flat on her back. The kitchen behind her was empty, counters bare, an old avocado-colored fridge free of photos or magnets or mementos.

Two doors to the left were shut and yellow-taped. I took that as a Keep Out. Drapes were drawn over every window. Fluorescent lighting in the kitchen supplied a nasty pseudo-dawn.

The woman’s head was twisted sharply to the right. A swollen tongue hung between slack, bloated lips.

Limp neck. A grotesque position some coroner might label “incompatible with life. ”

Big woman, broad at the shoulders and the hips. Late fifties to early sixties, with an aggressive chin and short, coarse gray hair. Brown sweatpants covered her below the waist. Her feet were bare. Unpolished toenails were clipped short. Grubby soles said bare feet at home was the default.

Above the waistband of the sweats was what remained of a bare torso. Her abdomen had been sliced horizontally below the navel in a crude approximation of a C-section. A vertical slit crossed the lateral incision at the center, creating a star-shaped wound.