There was a question in the air and I tried to answer it. “Claudia and I only talked on the phone once every month or so, and we’d send cards sometimes. She hates email, and she’s not on Facebook. I don’t know where she went. She never told me anything about it, except that she’d gotten herself clean. She didn’t give me details.” What I didn’t add was that Claudia had been furious at me when I’d called last February to tell her I’d decided to rent an apartment in Madrid for a while. You’re abandoning me? she’d asked in disbelief. I thought she’d stop speaking to me, but she’d called me repeatedly in March. Then she’d disappeared in April without a word. I knew at the time that her sudden silence was really a form of revenge.

“Okay,” said Bruxton. “She’s back on the grid in June. Barely. At the end of the month she asked the super to fix her bathroom ceiling. Water damage. Mr. Pete swears it was her. Some of her old friends see her now and then over the summer, usually at art galleries. She made a few calls about taking art classes, getting studio space. She’s avoiding her drug buddies, though. Her apartment’s empty for long stretches, which suggests she was staying somewhere else at least part of the time.” He drank some water. “Then she rematerializes with a bang at the end of August, beginning of September. Immediately gets her heroin connection going. People see her, she’s either high as a kite or weeping or both. She’s a mess. Then, in the middle of September, she drops from sight again.”

“No one knows where she went?”

“Actually, we do. If the financials hold up, she went back to Idylhaven.”

“What?” I asked. “Why did she go back? Is she there now?”

“No, she’s not. Last they saw of her was when she checked herself out on September twenty-ninth.”

“Where did she go? She didn’t just vanish into thin air!”

“We’re working on it,” Bruxton affirmed. “We talked to people at the gym the dead girl joined. Seems like she was there all the time, unless she was shopping. It looks like she met her friend Kaylee at the gym.”

“Have you found Kaylee Quan yet?”

“No.”

He didn’t seem particularly bothered by that, and his nonchalance bothered me. “This is all you’ve got?” I asked.

“It’s a lot.”

“You haven’t found out anything about where my sister is now. Your big lead is from September. You know it’s January, right?”

Bruxton shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We haven’t found any leads on your sister, so we’re following up on other angles.”

“What other angles? You’re making it sound like Claudia disappeared months ago.”