"Organized," I said.

"Oh yeah. Organized, creative and persuasive. She was a natural at this; I couldn't have done it better myself. She never tried to sign on the dole, which was smart; just got herself a job in a cafe in town, worked there full-time for the summer, then started at Trinity come October. Her thesis title is--you'll like this--'Other Voices: Identity, Concealment and Truth.' It's about women who wrote under other identities."

"Cute," I said. "So she had a sense of humor."

Frank gave me a quizzical look. "We don't have to like her, babe," he said, after a moment. "We just have to find out who killed her."

"You do. I don't. Got anything else?"

He flipped a smoke between his lips and found his lighter. "OK, so she's in Trinity. She makes friends with four other English postgrads, hangs out almost exclusively with them. Last September, one of them inherits a house from his great-uncle, and they all move into it. Whitethorn House, it's called. It's outside Glenskehy, just over half a mile from where she was found. On Wednesday night, she goes for a walk and never comes home. The other four alibi each other."

"Which you could have told me over the phone," I said.

"Ah," Frank said, rummaging in his jacket pocket, "but I couldn't have shown you these. Here we go: the Fantastic Four. Her housemates." He pulled out a handful of photos and spread them on the table.

One of them was a snapshot, taken on a winter day, thin gray sky and a sprinkle of snow on the ground: five people in front of a big Georgian house, heads tilted together and hair blown sideways in a swirl of wind. Lexie was in the middle, bundled in that same peacoat and laughing, and my mind did that wild lurch and swerve again: When was I ... ? Frank was watching me like a hunting dog. I put the photo down.

The other shots were stills pulled off some kind of home video--they had that look, blurry edges where people were moving--and printed out in the Murder squad room: the printer always leaves a streak across the top right corner. Four full-length shots, four blown-up head shots, all taken in the same room against the same ratty wallpaper striped with tiny flowers. There was a huge fir tree, no decorations, caught in the corner of two of the shots: just before Christmas.

"Daniel March," Frank said, pointing. "Not Dan, not God forbid Danny: Daniel. He's the one who inherited the house. Only child, orphaned, from an old Anglo-Irish family. Grandfather lost most of their money in dodgy deals in the fifties, but there's enough left to give Danny Boy a small income. He's on a scholarship, so he doesn't have fees to pay. Doing a PhD on, I kid you not, the inanimate object as narrator in early medieval epic poetry."

"No idiot, then," I said. Daniel was a big guy, well over six foot and built to match, with glossy dark hair and a square jaw. He was sitting in a wingbacked chair, delicately lifting a glass bauble out of its box and glancing up at the camera. His clothes--white shirt, black trousers, soft gray sweater--looked expensive. In the close-up his eyes, behind steel-rimmed glasses, were gray and cool as stone.