I smell the stench of decomposing flesh but it’s an olfactory phenomenon like a phantom pain. It’s remembered. It’s imagined. The odor has dissipated and I can’t really smell it in this remote part of the house. But the thought of it is a reminder of an unavoidable fact that has gnawed at me all day. The advanced rate of decomposition argues that Chanel Gilbert didn’t die late last night and definitely not this morning. Postmortem artifacts don’t lie even during a heat wave when the air-conditioning has been turned off.

But the meaning of such morbid phenomena can be misinterpreted if we’re given bad information, and I believe we have been, and that thought leads me to her gastric contents. The shrimp, rice, onions and peppers had barely begun to digest. A seafood creole or stew would be an unusual choice for breakfast but that doesn’t mean much. People eat all sorts of things at whatever time suits them. What I can say with certainty is she ate lunch or dinner or a snack, she possibly had a beer or a glass of wine, and very soon afterward something happened. She died. Or she was so traumatized and distressed that she went into fight-or-flight mode and the blood rushed to her extremities. Either way her digestion completely stopped.

This could suggest she ate a meal with her assailant, possibly inside this house, possibly at the kitchen table that now has been set with a collector’s plate taken off the wall. Possibly Chanel got up after her meal and moments later was beaten to death. Had she been out to dinner and was attacked at some point after she returned home it’s likely her digestion would have been further along, and next I think of the missing kitchen trash bag. I play out a scenario of someone bringing take-out food to the house. It might have been Chanel. It might have been her killer—it might have been Carrie Grethen.

I imagine Chanel eating and possibly within minutes being attacked or dead, and I find it curious that evidence of her last meal isn’t in the kitchen trash. It isn’t in the supercans at the side of the house. There’s no restaurant receipt anywhere either. But I don’t really need evidence like that no matter how helpful it might be. Chanel’s stomach contents tell me what she ingested before she died. I don’t know if her killer correctly anticipated what we would find on autopsy. Perhaps even Carrie isn’t well versed in the nuances of digestion.