I backed out of the room and shut the door behind me. When I turned back for the front room, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something. I turned to find a painting propped up against a wall in a niche right off the kitchen. I padded back, picked it up. A lighthouse. It’s Tim’s. Was this the missing seventh painting? Is this what Jung was seen taking from the Safe Passage? If so, what was he doing with it? Was Marta right? Had Jung trashed Tim’s boat for this?

I left everything as I’d found it and walked out, a sinking feeling in my gut. What if my client was a murderer? What better cover than to hire someone to look into a murder you yourself had committed? Him sending me off headed in the wrong direction to beat the wrong bushes would have given him plenty of time to get out of town, or out of the country, before I or anyone else even thought to look for him.

I sat in the car and thought it through, getting angrier by the minute. My phone signaled. I had an e-mail, a summary of the deep-dive report I’d requested on Spada. He’d come back just as clean as he had on my first run-through. He was, apparently, a man without blemish. After spending more than enough time with him in a close elevator, I knew that had to be a crock. Who the hell was he?

My phone rang in my hand. It was Turk, the janitor in my office building. Turk, a tatted-up biker partial to white T’s and motorcycle boots, had somehow landed a job in building maintenance. On the surface, it didn’t seem like a natural fit, but he proved to have an almost encyclopedic brain for fixing everything from a busted toilet to a wonky carburetor. He held the broken-in building together with little more than a pipe wrench, duct tape, and a confounding unflappability.

“Yeah, Cass, I thought I’d better call. You got a delivery here. I didn’t see who dropped it off, but they set it right outside your door. You want me to do something with it?”

I frowned. I wasn’t expecting any deliveries. “What is it?”

“Big box. Heavy. If it’s a piece of furniture, I can go ahead and put it together for you, if you want?”

“Is there a return address?”

“Hold on.” I could hear rustling on his end. I guessed he was checking the box. I waited, my breath holding, watching a couple of U of C students meander down the block toward the campus. My birthday was nine months away; Christmas six months away. There was no reason anything should be sitting outside my office door.