Jesse shrugged. “I used to like it up there. I haven’t been since what’s-his-name two-timed me with Bit Part.” Ted’s affair had been with an actor of some minor notoriety. “Goin’ with you will get the bad taste out of my mouth.”

Mouth. The word sank into my brain, jolting my memory. I grabbed the batch of pages I’d already dismissed as useless. Where was she? The woman who… there she was. I pulled out the sheet with her photograph. The woman had a face pale as a full moon and equally round; it was impossible to discern any cheekbones. There was none of the angular boniness so common among addicts. Her reddish-blond hair was artfully highlighted and styled, her makeup applied with an expert hand. But the oddly small rosebud mouth belonged to the woman I’d seen in the morgue.

“Trina Greene,” I said. “Jesse, this is her.”

He glanced at her photo and frowned before turning his eyes away. “Um, Lil? That’s a blond.”

“Right. Bruxton told me the dead woman’s natural hair color was strawberry blond, and that she’d dyed it black.” I was growing more excited as I spoke.

“Fair enough. But, as we say in Oklahoma, that there’s a big-boned gal.”

“You didn’t see the woman in the morgue. It’s her.” What had Kaylee Quan said? She told me she’d lost fifty pounds. She said she didn’t have any pictures of herself because she used to be a fat chick. I was looking at the fat chick, another Idylhaven inmate. Tariq had been right after all.

❖

We got to Lenox in time for a late lunch at a diner. We were the only people in the restaurant, and the waitress who served us was a chatterbox. Unfortunately, she didn’t recognize my photograph of Claudia, and she’d never heard of Trina Greene. “It’s like something right out of Law & Order,” she announced.

It was cold outside as we walked around the town square. “You should see this place in warm weather,” said Jesse. “Tanglewood–that’s what they call the bandshell–has the Boston orchestra visiting all summer. You can go to Edith Wharton’s mansion. What’s it called? Damn, that’ll probably wake me up at night…”

The Berkshires were a bustling hive in the summer months, and the fall attracted a share of tourists following the changing colors of the leaves on a trail that came down through Vermont’s Green Mountains. But in the winter, we were highly conspicuous as the lone tourists in the area. Well, not the only ones, but the others would be sequestered at one of the area’s two prime spas, Canyon Ranch or the Cranwell. We were probably the only tourists not swathed in seaweed at the moment.

“What do you want to hit first?” asked Jesse.