But this room, Hailey Gordon’s room, was a different story. Apart from the few pieces of furniture, there was hardly any proof that someone actually lived here. No family photos. No signs of high school, college, or sports allegiances. No picture of a boyfriend, no teddy bears. The books in the bookshelf were mostly math texts, physics, a little chemistry. The laptop was protected by a password that the techs at the field office would eventually be able to crack, but Zack didn’t expect they’d find much of interest within those bytes and bits.

The only thing in the room that offered even a hint that someone had been here in the past week was spread out across the second card table: a half-finished puzzle. At least a thousand pieces, which in itself was unremarkable. But the pieces were all white—no pictures, no color, not even a slight variation in shade. When Zack had first walked into the room, he’d turned a few of those pieces over, assuming they were upside down.

Hailey Gordon was certainly an enigma. Not the least because her name wasn’t actually Hailey Gordon. Although the facial recognition software at the casino had led Zack to this apartment, hers was a carefully crafted identity that went back many years. She had succeeded for all these years as someone who didn’t actually exist.

The girl who’d occupied this room and had been at the Encore casino twelve hours ago in the room of the murdered fence had been born Katie Allenbeck, in a small town near Fitchburg, by the New Hampshire state line. The staties had gotten one fingerprint off the yellow casino chip they’d found under the bed where Jimmy the Lip had been killed, and that fingerprint had been the first page of a memoir that tended almost entirely toward tragedy. Zack’s researchers at the field office had been able to fill in most of the pages.

Katie had been orphaned at the age of four when her parents had been killed in a car accident. No other family to speak of, she’d ended up in the system, bouncing from foster home to foster home, never quite finding the right fit. But at the age of ten, that had changed for her; she had been taken in by an older couple who’d raised dozens of foster kids. Dr. Lawrence Pinter, a retired engineer and scientist who spent his time collecting and repairing antique crystal radios in the basement of his rural home, aided by his wife, Martha Pinter, who had been a kindergarten teacher at the local public school. Good people, who’d never been able to have children of their own.