Archie reached into his pocket looking for the brass pillbox of Vicodin he usually had. It was reflex. He knew it wasn’t there. They had taken it at the hospital, along with his cell phone and the belt Debbie had given him on their last Christmas together. He hadn’t known what to do with his hands since. He settled on putting both of them in his pants pockets and focused on taking in the scene. The bathroom was familiar. The scratched sheet-metal mirror. The too-bright white walls. The fluorescent lights. It was not unlike his room at the psych ward. With at least one noticeable difference. The bathroom had been trashed. “Malicious mischief,” they called it, a term that Archie had always liked. Of the six stalls, five had been deliberately clogged with toilet paper and feces, a stew of brown sludge and disintegrating paper. The metal stall doors hung off their hinges. Someone had urinated on the floor. The porous concrete had absorbed most of it, but there were still a few standing puddles, reflecting the jumpy white fluorescents above. Pipe noise echoed in the room, water rushing, footsteps, everything louder, distorted. Archie leaned across the overflow to peer into the last stall, the one where they’d found the body parts. It was the cleanest of the stalls, the toilet seat still attached, the hinges intact. They had wanted someone to use that stall, to flush, to find the bloody surprise. They had wanted the drama.

An iPod in a yellow jelly case lay facedown on the floor at Archie’s feet.

Another flash went off. Archie turned to see the state trooper lower his camera. “Sorry,” the trooper said.

Claire Masland walked in. He hadn’t seen her in two months, but she didn’t let on. She smiled briskly, ran a hand through her short dark hair, and said, “Hi, Archie.”

She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of a bear on it and black motorcycle boots. Archie took a step toward her and picked a cat hair off her shirt. Henry had cats. “Hi, Claire,” Archie said.

Claire broke the seal on a water bottle she had in her hand and took a slug. “You seen the wall?” she asked.

“Show me,” Archie said.

It looked like the hearts had all been drawn by the same person. The same shape, two plump humps, a sharp point. The marker line thickness was consistent. It must have taken whoever did it a while, because there were a couple hundred hearts. Careful, methodical. Not the same person who’d torn apart the bathroom. Someone else.

Another flash.