The rest I’d already figured out. Marie had taken on Adeline’s identity, but she had to find a way to earn a living, preferably far from the Bay Area. She’d heard Sally Rand’s tour was having trouble finding dancers, and Marie had hoped she could wangle herself the chance for an audition with Nancy. But when Marie saw Nancy sitting with me, one of the last people to have seen her alive, she’d had no choice but to walk out the door and never come back. What if I’d recognized her and returned with the police?

I looked at Gail, and although I said nothing, something in my expression must have prompted her to say, “I know I must seem like a monster to be involved in all this, Ray, but everything I’ve done has been for a very good reason.”

I wanted to embrace her, tell her I understood, that what she’d done was human, but I couldn’t, I didn’t, and it wasn’t. “Gail, what about the bodies on Grizzly Peak?”

The words tumbled out of her. “I don’t know anything about them. I got a call yesterday morning from the police, saying they believed my mother and Russ had been killed and would I come to the morgue to view their remains—”

“Immediately after which,” I interrupted, “you got another call from your mother, letting you know she was all right?”

Gail said nothing.

I looked at Martha. “I imagine you have a second residence in Oakland?”

Martha said, “Nothing to brag about. A one-room flat with a Murphy bed, near Lake Merritt.”

“I bet it’s been a busy place, with you lying low there since you died, and Gail staying with you last night and today. And the woman who became your corpse.” I turned to Gail. “Do you know who that was?”

Gail shook her head. “At the morgue . . . sickening . . .”

“It was Marie Prasquier,” I said. “You can’t change the teeth in someone’s mouth, not without surgery that would be easily detected. But it doesn’t take surgery to change someone’s dental records. Especially not if you’re a trusted office worker who handles the filing for doctors and dentists around the area.” I said to Martha, who looked very different now than she had in her severe white medical uniform, “It only took changing the name on Marie Prasquier’s dental records to your own, and placing them in the files of a dentist whose practice had been taken over by someone else. Culpepper told me there’d been a list in your metal clutch bag—metal because you didn’t want the list to burn—of your important phone numbers, including the dentist who had your falsified records. The police went straight to where you wanted them to go.