The lights hadn’t come on yet, but the pink sunset was oozing in through a window at the far end of the hall. Someone had placed a package outside the office belonging to a button supplier. The door to 320 was closed just as I had left it. It was still unlocked. I felt the knob turn easily in my hand. It was one of those proverbial moments when your life passes in front of your eyes. I saw myself jumping off the roof at Melanie Hemmingway’s house on a dare when I was eight, swimming past the end of the pier at Wocala Beach in the dark, joyriding in a stolen car with Maxie Lewis when I was sixteen, the car accident when I was a freshman in college and the girl in the front seat went through the window. I would never be here if I didn’t hate my father. I’d be home, safely married to a guy with group insurance and monogrammed shirt cuffs. I didn’t want to see the dead woman in the torn underpants, but I stepped into the room.

The neon was still blinking. The walls were still yellow, the trashcan still upended.

But the room was empty.

Why had I never wondered if there had been sharks in the ocean at Wocala Beach? Or how high the roof I’d jumped off was? My heart pounded. Had someone seen me this evening when I discovered the dead woman? Clearly someone didn’t want her death known. But I had seen it. And so had Lupe.

Slowly I walked back out of the room through the open door down to the end of the hall. I stood staring numbly into the fading pink line of the horizon. The window looked out over an alley separating the building from an equally dismal row of sweatshops fifty yards away. It was postnuclear—the gutted buildings, the alley empty except for a trio of stalking cats. A number of chutes jutted out from the building and ran down to green metal dumpsters. The dumpsters were probably full of rats.

I decided I didn’t want to find out what other horrible things they might have in them.

CHAPTER FIVE

“How can she be gone?” demanded Lupe when I got back to where she was waiting and told her what I had seen.

Dazed, I shrugged and started down the stairs to get out of the building. “Don’t know,” I mumbled.

“Didn’t you look for her? She couldn’t have walked out on her own.”

“Let’s go.” I tried to step around her.

Lupe planted herself in front of me and glared up at me. “Wait a sec, didn’t you haul me down here so you could do a job? Find some broad. And now you’re not even going to look for her? You did take someone’s money to do this, didn’t you?”