“What do you want?” she asked.

Finch decided he wanted nothing. Asked a couple of easy questions. Showed her the photo of the dead man. The woman didn’t recognize him.

Tried a couple more doors. A middle-aged man in a tank top and shorts answered holding a frying pan. For defense? For dinner? Either way, he didn’t know anything, hadn’t seen anything.

Neither did the old married couple who might’ve lived there for forty, fifty years. Might even have recalled when 239 Manzikert Avenue hadn’t been a dump. The man stood behind the woman, peering out with the kind of distant stare Finch associated with the camps. The wife had a blotch of purple on her forehead that might’ve been a birthmark or might’ve been fungus.

The next interview went better. A man of about sixty answered. Slight build. Large blue eyes, accentuated by the wrinkles in his forehead. A cultured voice. He wore a too-tight dinner jacket. The points of the collars on the white shirt beneath stabbed the flesh of his neck. His wrists showed from the dark ends of his cuffs. He looked like a child in a straitjacket.

As Finch questioned him, he slowly realized the man had dressed up for the interrogation. Had heard him at other doors down the hall. Soon, the man was asking him to come in for tea. Polite in a way that hadn’t been common in Ambergris for years. Finch guessed violinist or theater owner. Either that or he’d once been the doorman.

He didn’t know anything about the murders. (Finch couldn’t recall when he’d started calling them murders, but the word felt right.) Thought the man in the photograph looked familiar, but couldn’t place him. In the way people do when they’re trying to help.

Then the man asked if the people living there had been of use.

“People living there?” Finch echoed.

“Yes. There were people living there. A man. A woman.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I don’t know their names.”

Didn’t know anything else, either.

Who was lying to him then? Heretic? The Partial?

Remembered Heretic’s strange mood as he headed up to the fifth floor.

In the apartment, the bodies lay much as before. Except that each had sprouted a thick, emerald-green stalk topped by a nodule. The detectives called them memory bulbs. No one could pronounce what the gray caps called them. Sounded like a word between “loam” and “leer.” An aqua-colored nodule for the man. Bright orange for the gray cap. Which meant Finch had learned something new.

The bodies still looked peaceful. Even with the dull light streaming through the open window. The man looked better preserved than when Finch had seen him that morning. Sometimes death did that. For a time.

A figure stepped out of the back room. The Partial, grinning. “Shit.” Finch’s gun appeared in his hand. Heart pounding.

“I’d aim that somewhere else if I were you,” the Partial said. Fungal eye blinking and blinking. Recording.