“The Oracle Hotel?” Bruxton’s jaw was taut as it worked the gum. “I just read something about that place, maybe a month ago. Wasn’t there some problem with it?” If by problem, he meant that Martin had stuffed another unnecessarily chi-chi hotel into an overcrowded neighborhood, then sure.

“It opened a month ago, Brux. There were articles about it everywhere. Not that I read them,” Renfrew confessed. “You know how much reading I get away with when my kids are around.”

Bruxton looked at me. “Okay. You know Martin Sklar, how?”

“I just told you. He’s an old friend.”

“Well, we’ll definitely have a word with him,” said Bruxton. “He was sure it was your sister he spoke with?”

“Yes,” I said. “Martin said the woman was Claudia.”

“We’ve pulled the phone LUDs for the apartment’s land line,” said Renfrew, taking a sheaf of papers out of her briefcase and handing them to me. “We’ve got everything from September onwards. We couldn’t find any record of a cell phone.”

“Claudia doesn’t have one. She hates gadgets,” I said. I didn’t add that my sister mocked me for writing on a laptop. Do you think Poe would have composed “Annabel Lee” on a computer? she’d taunt. I’d remind her that I wasn’t writing poetry, and her rejoinder was that I should be.

“Take a look at the records from the land line,” Renfrew added, pushing a ballpoint pen across the table. “Any numbers you recognize?”

I glanced over the top pages, then flipped ahead to the end of December, scanning the outgoing numbers from Christmas Eve on. There were none that I recognized. No calls to Martin. I looked again, wondering if I’d missed them. They weren’t there. My face felt hot as I realized that Martin had lied to me. I bit my lip and looked at the incoming calls. There was Martin’s number. The list swam before my eyes, and jealousy prickled me as I noticed it came up repeatedly. He had called Claudia’s apartment three times in the middle of the day on New Year’s Eve, then again at nine-fifteen in the morning on New Year’s Day. There was a call from Martin on her birthday in November, and another in mid-September. The calls were so brief it didn’t seem as if he’d spoken to anyone, but seeing it in black and white made my stomach churn. Once, just after Claudia moved in with me, Claudia had gotten out of the shower and let her towel slip off in front of Martin. That was something I’d never be able to forgive her for.