I looked into Bruxton’s cold blue eyes and knew I’d never be able to explain it to him. I’d invited Claudia to come live with me after her boyfriend died of his overdose. She’d been staying with him and I was afraid she’d end up on the street, careening from shelter to shelter, as she had in the past. But six months of living with a junkie was sheer agony, and it drove me out of my own home. “Claudia’s been homeless before, and she needed a place to live,” I said. “I moved to Spain for work, and I mail the rent so she can’t use the money for anything else.”

Mr. Pete unlocked the door and stepped back, gesturing for me to go first. I turned on the light next to the door. The room looked just as empty and forlorn as it had the day before, and the sweet perfumey smell I’d disliked so much yesterday, still floated through the air.

“Okay, walk us through,” said Renfrew. “Think about the things that didn’t seem right to you in here.”

That wasn’t as easy as it sounded. As I looked around the room I thought that something had shifted from when I’d last seen it. Hadn’t that tacky red card been on the top shelf of the bookcase rather than the next shelf down? I wasn’t certain so I didn’t mention it. I was already on shaky ground; the oddities that had caught my eye could be explained away as a simple change in preferences or tastes. They wouldn’t seem important to anyone who didn’t know Claudia. When I spoke, I sounded silly even to myself. “Yesterday, when I saw the magazines and DVDs here, it made me think that Claudia had really changed.”

“What was she into?” asked Bruxton.

“The Sorrows of Young Werther.” Both detectives looked blank. “Goethe.”

“Very beautiful book,” Mr. Pete added. “Tragic, but romantic.”

“Don’t think I’ve read it,” Renfrew admitted.

“That’s the kind of thing Claudia likes.” There was a line of Ava Gardner’s that Claudia liked to paraphrase. Deep down, you’re pretty superficial, she would say to me. Sometimes she was contemptuous, like when she bought me Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre and months later I admitted I couldn’t finish it because it pushed me into a place darker than I was willing to go. Occasionally Claudia said it fondly, like when she caught me watching The Barefoot Contessa for the hundredth time. “Look at her bookcases,” I said. “It’s all Thomas Mann and Dostoyevsky and Knut Hamsun.”