“You weren’t one of her clients? You didn’t get those marks on your wrist some other way? You weren’t coming out here, paying her to do some things for you your wife’s just not too crazy about?” He smiled, like we were just a couple of guys, talking. “Look, it happens. You’re married awhile, you have the kids, the wife’s just not into it like she used to be, and her idea of kinky is doing it with the lights on.”

“Don’t speak about my wife that way,” I said.

Flint’s eyebrows went up. “My apologies. That was rude. I was just speaking generally. But you didn’t answer my question. Were you paying her? Were you hiring her for one of her little sessions?”

“No.”

Flint kept going over the same ground, again and again. What time I got there, what I’d been doing before my arrival, where Trixie might have gone, did she have any family that I knew of, who might have done this to Benson, whether I’d noticed anyone else around the house. My earlier meeting with Benson, how it had gone wrong, my subsequent demotion at the Metropolitan.

I was getting a headache.

“So both you and Ms. Snelling, you had really good reasons to be angry with Martin Benson,” Detective Flint said.

I thought about that. “The thing is, the damage had already been done,” I said. “The paper got the picture they wanted, they ran it. I think that’s when things started to totally unravel for Trixie. Someone saw that picture, tipped off someone who’d been trying to find her, and they tracked her down to this house. It was the thing she’d been worried about from the beginning.”

“And what was Martin Benson doing here in the first place?”

It was a good question. “Maybe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe he was trying to get more dirt on Trixie, and the guys who came to get her found him instead.”

Flint’s lips pursed out, considering it.

“Or,” he said, tipping his fedora back an inch and exposing the top of his white forehead, “it could be a whole lot simpler than that.”

“What do you mean?”