‘A shipping container at a dump?’ Thistle says doubtfully.

‘Some people, they have strange tastes,’ Gomez says.

‘Do you still have the skin?’ I ask. ‘With the tattoo?’

‘At home. Hidden in a Ziploc bag under the carpet. I didn’t know how to get rid of it.’

This reminds me of all the body parts hidden in my house, waiting for me. It takes effort to bring the hospital room back into focus.

‘This man at the restaurant,’ Thistle says, ‘was he white? Big?’

‘No. He is Latino, skinny. With a moustache, and an earring. Gold.’

‘Which ear?’

He thinks about it. ‘Left.’

‘You know his name?’

‘No.’

I want to show him a photo of Charlie Warner. She’s blonde, tallish. Capable of skinning people.

But Thistle will want to know the connection, and other than the fact that Biggs’s body turned up right near our usual drop-off point, I don’t have one. As I’m trying to come up with a plausible excuse, something else occurs to me. Charlie Warner isn’t the only good-looking blonde I’ve seen hanging around since I started working on this case.

‘Please,’ Gomez says. ‘I’ve answered your questions. I need to go home to my family. They’ll be scared.’

‘You resisted arrest,’ Thistle says. ‘Twice. We can’t just let you go home.’

‘Agent Thistle,’ I say. ‘A word?’

Thistle follows me out into the corridor.

‘I think we should send him home,’ I say.

Thistle looks incredulous. ‘Our only suspect?’

‘He’s not a suspect. He’s a witness at best.’

‘He hasn’t given us a sliver of evidence that his story is true. He works at the place where all the phone trails end, and where the blood of one of the victims was found. He fled from us. Twice. No one else has seen this woman.’

‘Ian McLean has,’ I say. ‘She picked up Daniel Ruthven in her car on the night he disappeared.’

‘That could have been anyone.’

‘We’ve seen her too. She was outside Shannon Luxford’s office.’

‘She …’ Thistle trails off, remembering the tall, glamorous blonde we saw in the math department. Who saw us, and turned quickly away.

‘It’s a stretch,’ Thistle says finally.

‘Is it? She looked like she was doing the same thing we were doing. Asking if anyone had seen Biggs. She was showing a picture on her phone to a student.’

‘But if she killed him, she knows exactly where he is.’

No, I think to myself. Because I took the body. She may not even know he’s dead.

‘Let’s say she was driving him somewhere,’ I say, ‘and he escaped. Jumped out of a moving car and ran into the woods, for example. So she went to his work looking for him.’