“She wasn’t twenty-seven.” We were almost at Jesse’s building now. Bruxton parked in an illegal space and turned the car off. “The ME thinks she was in her mid-thirties. There’s evidence she was anorexic as well as bulimic.”

“Her heart just gave out like that?” I glanced at my cigarette surreptitiously.

“It can happen, especially given her health issues. She was hooked on diet pills and laxatives, and she was apparently obsessed with exercise. Believe it or not, too much exercise hurts your heart.” Bruxton lit a fresh cigarette. “ME said a jolt to the heart could have killed her. There’s no bruising on her chest, though. He told me about a corpse he autopsied a while back, guy had been punched square in the chest and dropped dead. Boring bar fight turned into manslaughter. Guy died so fast there wasn’t even a bruise where he’d been hit.” He took a long drag.

I was picturing Claudia when he was speaking. My sister had a problem with impulse control and a violent streak. When she was frustrated or furious she lashed out at people. What if she’d gotten into an argument with this woman, hit her, and the woman had dropped dead?

“But there’s more,” Bruxton said, breaking into my thoughts. “There was Rohypnol in her system.”

“The date-rape drug?”

“That’s the one. ME’s office is still running tests. They said it was a trace amount, like she had a couple sips of a drink laced with it.”

As we walked into Jesse’s building, I was trying to make sense of it. The woman’s death wasn’t really like my mother’s suicide, but it looked like it on the surface. Had my sister accidentally hurt the other woman, killing her and leaving Claudia with a dead body on her hands? Was it possible that my sister had staged the scene to make it look like an accident or a suicide? That would have taken more cynical calculation than I’d ever known my impulsive sibling to have. Of course, if she had come up with such a plan, I’d come to town and ruined everything. What I wasn’t admitting to Bruxton was that I knew Claudia had used Rohypnol from time to time. It was a way to enhance the high from heroin and soften the landing afterwards. Still, if I knew that about the drug, so did Bruxton.