Three days ago his apartment had probably been a charming place, sparely furnished with a few good pieces, at least as nearly as I could make them out under the upended plants, CD and DVD covers, and dishes that had been dumped from a wooden hutch onto the floor.

The destruction felt like a shock wave. Angela’s description of her cousin came to me: the little boy who’d carefully put his farm animals to bed at night. Not nice, not nice at all.

I tiptoed around the mess to peer into his kitchen alcove. The same violent hands had dumped canisters of rice and pasta onto the countertop. Ants were rooting around in the food, which had spilled onto the floor.

In the small bedroom, the mattress had been pulled from the bed, the bedding itself wadded into a ball and flung to the doorway. French windows led from the bed to a narrow balcony, where planters with baby sunflowers and late tomatoes had been emptied. The flowers were still alive, growing in the dirt that had landed around them, but the tomatoes looked feeble.

I tried to search for anything that might tell me where or when August had gone. I snapped pictures with my phone, close-ups of individual pieces of damage, wider shots of the general disarray. I started in the bedroom, then worked my way around the balcony and back to the main room.

When I’d taken a few hundred shots, I returned to the bedroom and unfurled the bedclothes, laying them across the slit mattress. I didn’t see any bloodstains, either there or on the floor or furniture. Not that I travel with luminol and a UV light, but these weren’t subtle fingers at work, here or in Evanston.

Bernie and Angela had said August wanted to make movies. I didn’t see any cameras or laptops, but that didn’t mean anything: the wreckers could have taken them, August could have left with them, even the cops might have lifted them, since the bagel eater said they’d been here yesterday.

Looking around, I wondered if the police had really come. There wasn’t any crime-scene tape, nor the telltale silver dust of a fingerprint search.

I sat back on my heels. There had to be something here that would give me a starting point. August owned books as well as CDs and DVDs. It seemed beside the point to worry about disturbing evidence; I just didn’t want to leave my own prints here. Using my coat sleeve, I picked up books, shook them to see if any useful notes slipped out, then closed them and put them back on their shelves. He had a solid collection of black writers: James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Angela Davis.