It was a nice house. I don't know what I expected, but someone had made good choices. The whole place had a stripped-down feeling: bare, gleaming wood floors, furniture with simple lines, clean surfaces. Why had Camilla left this? What else was she looking for?

He showed me three bedrooms, two baths, a deck out back and a small yard enclosed by a vine-covered stucco wall.

"I'll tell you the truth," he said. "When she walked out, I packed up all her stuff and had the Salvation Army come take it away. I wasn't going to sit around looking at her little artsy-fartsy geegaws. I kept the kids' rooms intact. Maybe she'll get tired of them like she got tired of me and send them back, but her stuff I don't need. She was royally irritated when she heard, but what was I supposed to do?" He shrugged, standing there holding the beer bottle by the neck.

His face was beginning to take form now that I'd seen him twice. Before, I'd only registered qualities like "bland" and "harmless." I'd been aware of the extra weight he carried, a personality made up of something nice mixed with something droll. He was direct and I responded to that, but he also had a trait I'd noticed in certain cops before: bemused self-assurance, as if he were looking at the world from a long way back but it was all okay with him. Clearly, Camilla still loomed large in his life and he smiled every time he talked about her, not with affection, but to cover his wrath. I thought he needed to go through a few more women before he got down to me.

"What is that? What's that look?" he asked.

I smiled. "Beware of dog," I said. I'm not sure if I was talking about him or me.

He smiled too, but he knew what I meant. "I got the stuff in here."

He pointed toward the dining-room table in an alcove just off the living room.

I sat down in a hot circle of light, feeling like a glutton with a napkin tucked under my chin and a knife and fork upright in each fist. Along with the reports he'd Xeroxed, he'd also managed to slip me some duplicate photographs. I was going to see the after math of the crime with m own eyes and I could hardly wait.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14