Bailey pointed to an evidence bag filled with pill bottles. “Prescription meds, with and without prescriptions. Antipsychotics, antidepressants. Whole bunch of painkillers—OxyContin, Demerol, Vicodin, Percodan, Percocet, Valium, even some morphine.”

“Jesus, where’d she buy them?” Mahler ran his fingers over the bag.

“Honestly?” Bailey shrugged. “Any high school parking lot.”

Bailey gave Mahler a framed photograph in a plastic bag. “This was on the victim’s bedside table. On the back side is a handwritten inscription: ‘Saint-Jean-de-Côle, 1983.’ It’s a small town in the Dordogne, in southwestern France. The man in the picture is probably Sebastien Durand, the victim’s father. The Keats book, which I’ll come to in a minute, has the same inscription and a note that says, ‘votre père aimant,’ or ‘love, your father.’ You can verify that, of course, when you talk to the victim’s mother.”

Mahler pressed the plastic tight against the photograph and studied the image. “She had her father’s eyes.”

Bailey waited for Mahler to finish. “Sir, I’m not sure how the rest of this applies to your investigation, but maybe it gives you a sense of the victim.” She looked back and forth at Mahler and Rivas.

Mahler put the photograph back on the table. “Just show us.”

Bailey held up the art poster. “This was on the victim’s wall. It’s a copy of a painting by a nineteenth-century artist named John Everett Millais. It shows the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet lying on her back as she drowns in a river.”

Mahler leaned closer. “What’s written at the bottom?”

“‘As one incapable of her own distress.’ It’s a line from the play as Ophelia’s dying. From other evidence, the phrase matches our victim’s handwriting.”

Bailey picked up a second, poster-sized paper. “This collage appears to have been made by the victim. In the center is an enlargement of the framed photo of her father and a black-and-white drawing of the poet John Keats. The inscription, Ne m’oubliez pas, means ‘Do not forget me.’ At the bottom are two lines of poetry. I did a web search on them; they’re from poems by Frank O’Hara and Robert Lowell. I printed out copies of the full poems.”

Rivas took the collage from Bailey. “The former roommate, Alvarez, said she thought the victim’s depression was caused by her father’s abandonment. These words she’s written here…she didn’t want her father to forget her.”

Mahler looked over Rivas’s arm at the collage. “Explains the picture of Keats, too. The psychiatrist said the victim sometimes believed her father was Keats and was trying to communicate with her through his poetry.”