“What about traces of her in your car?” Russell asked.

“Steam cleaned this morning. Nothing left but what I remember.”

Thackrey leaned back in his chair. “That’s what’s so maddening. She could be wonderful. One night after Christmas, we had dinner with friends. Went to an Italian restaurant called Acquerello off Van Ness in the city. She entertained us for an hour. Told a story about how the English artist Turner added beeswax or something to his paints. Then she talked about a letter that Keats wrote. She knew things like that. When she was on, she was…glorious. So different from Reggie.”

“Didn’t save her from ending up like Reggie, though, did it?” Victor said.

Thackrey fired the tennis ball at Victor, who missed catching it and was nearly knocked over as the mastiff slammed into his legs to retrieve the toy.

When the dog returned to his side, Thackrey rubbed the top of its head. “But Elise was crazy, too. Crazy and messy. Nothing would change that—she was always going to be crazy. And we were wrapped up with each other, entangled, and I didn’t know how to separate us. No matter what I did, we kept…being together.”

Thackrey looked out the open door. “Odd, isn’t it?” he said. “All the poetic wisdom in the world about falling in love, one soul finding another, but no poetry to help us know how to remove someone from our lives.”

Chapter Eighteen

(i)

(WEDNESDAY, 4:09 P.M.)

Coyle parked at an apartment building on the city’s west side—the address for Jessica Alvarez, a former roommate of Elise Durand.

Alvarez, a woman in her twenties, answered the door. She showed Coyle through a corridor to a bright, uncluttered living room. The apartment smelled of new paint and carpets. They sat on opposite sides of a sofa.

“I’m still in shock,” Alvarez said. She had designer glasses and wore a cotton plaid shirt and jeans. “I’ve never known someone who was murdered. It’s…I don’t know…scary.”

Coyle saw wariness in the woman’s eyes. He’d seen the look before and knew that he had brought this thing, this threat, into the room with him, almost like he was coated with a stain. His face and clothes now embodied for Alvarez another world from her own, a nighttime place she locked her door against—a dirty, ugly world where a girl’s body was found in a park.

He nodded, as if he agreed that the murder of her friend was scary, as if he remembered his own innocence. He took a notebook and pen from his pocket. “We’re hoping you can help us. Anything you can tell us about the victim.”

“Elise and I were friends. Good friends. I think I was the only one allowed to call her Elise. She was trying to make everyone else call her Lisa.”

“You shared a house for a while?”