I went up and down Canal Street looking for Claudia. This was her prime area for scoring a fix, and while Mal Sabado was in jail, she’d have other dealers lined up. As I’d walked towards West Broadway, I’d caught sight of the Oracle. It was a block south of Canal and I was desperate to be distracted while I waited for the detectives or Tariq to come up with a lead.

By noon I’d given up on a chance sighting of Claudia, and I returned to Jesse’s to regroup. I had to be missing something. There was a clue I’d overlooked, maybe a dozen of them. But where did I begin? Leafing idly through Alexander Gorevale’s hardcover book, Rising From the Ashes, I couldn’t believe Claudia had fallen for him, or for his nonsensical theories. Gorevale’s sophisticated turns of phrase ran along the lines of “Family ties are a load of lies,” and he regarded the poet Philip Larkin as an authority on relationships. Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” was even quoted in the preface: They fuck you up, your mum and dad. Gorevale seemed to view the family as an unhealthy entity that crushed the individual. Had that appealed to Claudia, given how dysfunctional our own family was? Even before my father died, my family had issues. My mother drank, though nowhere near as much as she later did, and my parents fought, often long and loud. That wasn’t anything I wanted to remember, and I slammed the book shut. Next I pulled out the dentist’s bills. Poor Curtis Herrold, DDS, of Lenox, Massachusetts. He was the man who’d fixed my sister’s broken tooth, filled cavities and provided extensive dental care, and he had been shafted to the tune of thousands of dollars. Another black mark against Claudia; they were piling up quickly now. I sighed and dialed his number. “Good afternoon, Curtis Herrold,” bellowed a man with a jolly voice.

“My name is Lily Moore. We haven’t met, but I’m calling about my sister, Claudia Moore.”

There was a pause on the other end. “Claudia?”

“I found some notices that she owed you money and I…”

“Oh, no. I mean, I’m very sorry.”

“Sorry?” My ears perked up. “Sorry about what?”

There was a long pause. “She said she was sick,” Herrold said. “I’d been sending her bills and… um. I was sorry to hear that.”

“Oh. When was that?” I asked, confused.

“Um. Some months ago, I guess. I…” He’d sounded like he was going to elaborate but the answer had escaped his brain.

“She’s missing,” I said. “The police are trying to contact her. Do you know where she might be?”

“Me? How would I know anything like that?”

“Maybe you had another address for Claudia? I wondered if you were sending the most recent invoices to another address.”