MORELLI OPENED THE DOOR, and we carefully picked our way around the broken glass. He looked under the sink, found a pair of rubber gloves, put them on and wiped his prints off the doorknob. "You don't need to worry about prints," he said. "You were here legitimately two days ago."

We did a fast walk-through just to make sure there were no bodies, dead or alive. Then we methodically worked our way through the rooms. Closets, drawers, hidden places, garbage bags.

All of their clothes were gone, and as far as I could tell, so were the prizes they'd won. They'd been in a hurry. Beds were unmade. Food had been left in the fridge. There'd been a struggle in the living room, and no one had bothered to make repairs. We didn't find anything that might hint at a new address. No sign of drugs. No bullets embedded in woodwork. No bloodstains.

My only conclusion was that they weren't great housekeepers and were probably going to end up with diverticulitis. They ate a lot of bologna and white bread, smoked a lot of cigarettes, drank a lot of beer and didn't recycle.

"Gone," Morelli said, snapping the gloves off, returning them to the sink.

"Any ideas?"

"Yeah. Let's get out of here."

We ran to the truck, and Morelli drove to the boardwalk. "There's a pay phone at the top of the ramp," he said. "Call the police and tell them you're a neighbor, and you noticed a back window was broken in the house next door. I don't want to leave that house open for vandalism or robbery."

I took stock of myself and decided I couldn't get much wetter, so I sloshed through the rain to the phone, made the call and sloshed back.

"Everything go okay?" he asked.

"They didn't like that I wouldn't tell them my name."

"You're supposed to make something up. Cops expect it."

"Cops are weird," I said to Morelli.

"Yeah," he said, "cops scare the hell out of me."

I took my shoes off and buckled myself in. "You want to hazard a guess on what happened in the living room back there?"

"Someone came after Maxine, chased her around the living room and got hit from behind by a blunt instrument. When he woke up the three women were gone."

"Maybe that someone was Eddie Kuntz."

"Maybe. But that doesn't explain why he's still missing."

THE RAIN STOPPED halfway home, and Trenton showed no sign of relief from the heat. The hydrocarbon level was high enough to etch glass, and the highways hummed with road rage. Air conditioners were failing, dogs had diarrhea, laundry mildewed in hampers, and sinus cavities felt filled with cement. If the barometric pressure dropped any lower everyone's guts would be sucked through the soles of their feet into the bowels of the earth.