In raised letters on its bottom tray is A la Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, the name of the Paris zoo. Wedged underneath the stand, between the back of it and the wall, is a twisted dark blue plastic ring.

“We’ve been here all of an hour. The plan is for us to do the walk-through with you before anything’s disturbed,” Burke explains, as if I’m the one who requested this tour, which really isn’t a tour.

It’s a hunt.

“Then Sil will collect evidence if there is any,” she says. “He’ll lift prints if we find them. But I don’t think anyone of interest was in here. I don’t think this is a crime scene. Hard to know at this point who’s been in and out and how recently, and we’ll certainly get those answers, but it’s doubtful they’ll be relevant.”

It’s obvious she’s convinced of that by now, and probably was convinced of it before she got here.

“There’s no sign of a struggle, of violence, but you’re the expert,” she says to me the way a defense attorney might. “Nothing seems to be missing in terms of possible robbery. Some rather expensive jewelry in her bedroom, in a dresser drawer, nothing looks rifled through or disturbed. Her car’s locked up in the garage.”

“We’ll want to look,” Benton says. “We’ll want to check gauges, check how much gas, check the GPS, if she’s got one.”

“Sil’s called for a truck,” Burke says.

“Good, because the car shouldn’t be examined here,” I answer. “It should go to the labs, to the evidence bay.”

She asked me here as an expert, and I will be one. I could walk back out the door, but I won’t.

“The battery’s probably dead,” Benton comments.

“Shit.” Burke dabs her nose with a tissue. “I’m going to claw my eyes out with this goddamn dust.”

“What about the car key?” he asks.

“On that table there in the bowl, probably where she usually left it.”

“A pocketbook, a wallet?” His sharply handsome face is framed in white polypropylene.

“No sign of either,” Burke says. “It’s looking like she went somewhere and then whatever happened happened. Of course, we don’t know if she’s a homicide. We don’t know for a fact she met up with foul play, do we, Kay?”

She isn’t asking. She’s testing.

“How do you suppose she managed to vanish if she didn’t drive,” I ask pointedly. “She physically left this house at some point. Yet her car key is here? Her car is here?”

“The thing is”—Burke watches me crouch near the umbrella stand, looking at the twisted plastic ring without touching it—“we don’t know for a fact that she vanished from Cambridge or even from Massachusetts.”