“I just wish you wouldn’t,” I’m saying.

“You know me. I’m always honest.” He shuts a drawer of pot holders and dish towels.

“Please don’t give her any reason to sue the CFC, calling it a hostile workplace, for example, because people like you slam doors in her face. I don’t care if it’s honest.”

“I don’t like her and it’s not because she has my old job.”

Inside the refrigerator I scan shelves of bottled water and juices, and white wine, sticks of butter and condiments. I think about Chanel’s gastric contents. It would seem she ate a seafood dish, possibly a creole gumbo, stew or soup shortly before she was murdered. But I don’t see fresh vegetables such as peppers and onions or anything that suggests she cooked such a thing, and there’s no take-out box. I begin to wonder about the trash that’s disappeared. I mention it in a guarded way to Marino, knowing our every word may be monitored.

I let him know I’m not seeing anything that might indicate someone has eaten or prepared food in recent memory. The only exception is the cold-pressed fresh juices. There are five glass bottles of them, deep red concoctions. I open one and smell ginger, cayenne pepper, kale and beets. I seriously doubt the perishable drinks are available in any grocery store I’ve been to in the Cambridge area, and I’m again reminded that this house isn’t even two miles from mine. It’s barely ten minutes from my office. It’s possible Chanel Gilbert and I shopped, gassed up our cars, ran errands in some of the same places.

“A lot of these fresh juice companies deliver,” I’m saying to Marino. “And this particular brand isn’t one I’ve ever seen in a store.”

He picks up a bottle of the dark red juice, turns it in his hand, inspecting the label. The name of the company is 1-Octen. It occurs to me the bottles look like the ones I saw in a bag in the back of the red Range Rover.

“No company address anywhere, no expiration date. Sort of looks like a computer-generated label, sort of homemade?” He returns the bottle to the shelf, takes off his gloves and dips into a pocket for his phone. “And now I’m Googling it and nothing. There’s no such company. A freaky name. Maybe as in octane? Like a high-octane super fuel or food?”

“Or in one-octen-three-one,” I suggest. “The molecular composition for the odorant that depending on other things causes blood to smell metallic.”

“Blood?”

“This particular blend of juice obviously is heavy in beets, explaining the deep red color. Like blood, like the essence, the fluid of life. Beets are high in iron, and iron is what we smell when blood touches our skin. One-Octen is an odd if not distasteful name for a food.”