“Of course I want to see it,” Mel says. “Are you kidding? How often does a chance like this come along?”

Rose takes the plastic bag out of the lettuce drawer and dumps the towel-wrapped morsel onto the counter. With tongs and a fork, she peels the paper back.

“Jeez,” Mel breathes. “It looks so much like a finger. I mean, you know, a finger.”

“Creepy, huh?”

“Wrap it back up.”

Rose does, and drops the package back into the drawer.

“That’ll be a big surprise for the cleaning lady,” Mel says, after they’ve returned to the living room and are sprawled on the couch, the only usable area remaining in the house. “You don’t think the break-in could be a coincidence?” she asks. “Guy thinks the house is empty. It’s not. So he decides to kill the witness?”

“I didn’t witness him until he came back for me,” Rose says. “That’s the telling part. He was scot-free, run of the house to burgle at will. He takes nothing, then comes back for me.”

“Pretty convincing,” Mel admits.

“Don’t forget, he broke the glass in the door on his way out, not in.”

“So a key or a good lock picker,” Mel says.

“And when I cut off his finger, he said, ‘You are one crazy bitch,’ not ‘You are one crazy bitch.’ That suggests to me that he was sent here by somebody who called me a crazy bitch. Now we’re back to Longwood. Nobody else in this town knows me well enough to call me a crazy bitch.”

“Grandma Nancy,” Mel offers.

“Other than Grandma Nancy.”

“Stella.”

“Other than Grandma Nancy and Stella.”

After a moment of quiet cogitation, Mel leaps up with a lithe grace Rose can barely remember. She gathers the paintings, eight finished, and props them against boxes where they can be easily viewed from the sofa. That done, she plops down next to Rose, her feet folded beneath her. “So that’s our guy,” she says. “He looks properly thuggish.”

The two study the paintings for a while.

“Hispanic? Korean? Italian? Hawaiian?” Mel suggests.

“Maybe.” Rose stares at the paintings. There is more detail than she’d first thought. “Hispanic or Italian,” she decides. “Very dark eyes, almost black.” She looks at the piratical figure with the knife in its jaws. “Good straight teeth,” she adds. “Or were. When I pulled the knife away, one of his incisors broke off.”

“Ouch!” Mel says.

“It did make him a tad waspish,” Rose says.

“Not tall but thick,” Mel adds. “I’m guessing late twenties or thirty?”

“My guess, too.”

“With these and the fingerprint, the cops should be able to find him, wouldn’t you think?” Mel says.

“You’d think,” Rose agrees. “But that doesn’t make it so. Me, they’d nail in a heartbeat. A bird in the hand as it were. Maybe even a nice mention on the six o’clock news.”