The living room windows offered a broad view southward, the river a gray slab fading under gloomy veils of rain that looked painted on the air, sooty strokes that sagged even as Devlin drew his eyes away and closed the door. The place, darkened now, had been given a good working over, and Susan Michaels had not gotten around to even a few first steps to putting the place right, like closing doors and drawers. Books were in disarray on the shelves, clothing heaped over the back of the couch. In the kitchen, food covered every surface, cereal boxes crushed, jars and bottles opened and left that way. Open cupboards displayed appliances and serving bowls that were obviously out of place. Not so bad, Devlin was thinking. A really thorough police search could reduce an ex-con middleweight contender to a sobbing heap, begging the cops to stop. The stove could be pulled out from the wall, for instance. This one had not, and the dust and grease of sixty or seventy years of all kinds of cooking was a wonderful place to hide photographs, or even a few documents.

No. The scraped palms of his hands didn’t like the sharp metal edges of the back of the stove, but worse, his chest muscles, for all their recently developed strength, didn’t like wrestling with a near immovable object.

In all, this search had been a good one. Someone had preceded Devlin through the freezer, ripping into the packages to be sure they really did contain peas, mixed vegetables, and Mrs. Paul’s Frozen Fish Filets. The garbage had been emptied into the sink, and a serving spoon nearby looked as if it had been used to paw through the chicken bones and pizza crusts. Returning to the living room, Devlin had to half leap over a pile of LPs splashed behind the sofa. The pictures on the walls of the hall were askew, and the bedroom doorways facing each other gave glimpses of more chaos inside. In the right-hand room the mattress was square with the innerspring; Devlin took the other room to be Jane Milburn’s.