phone. “Thanks. I’ll write him,” she said, folding the piece of paper and sliding it into her jacket pocket.
“Should I let him know before you do? He just e-mailed me, and if I wrote him back . . .”
“You can tell him the police were here and that we’ll be in touch. I don’t want to make any pronouncements about Audrey Marshall till we have an identification, okay?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’ve been very helpful.” She was turning back toward the door. Kate went around her and opened it. There was now a small crowd in the hall, including an older man in a suit who immediately spotted Detective James and said, “Jesus. There you are.”
Before leaving, Detective James said: “We might need to search your apartment. Would you agree to that?”
“Why?” Kate asked.
The detective pressed her lips together before saying, “If we find anything that might connect the death next door with your cousin, then we’ll need to take a look around. That’s all.”
“It’s okay with me, I guess,” Kate said.
“Thank you very much. We’ll be in touch.” The detective handed Kate her card before leaving. Kate studied it after shutting the door. roberta james, detective. Under the name were the Boston Police Department shield, a phone number, and an e-mail.
Kate pressed her ear to the door to see if she could hear anything from the hallway. There were noises—the squawk of radios and the muddy tones of indiscernible voices. She looked through the peephole and saw the same detective knocking on the door of the third apartment on her hall. The door swung open, and the detective held up her badge to its resident; Kate couldn’t see into the apartment. While the other neighbor was being questioned, two more plainclothes officers entered the hall from the stairwell, both heavyset men in dark suits. One was clean-shaven and the other sported a gray goatee.
A ripple of panic swept over Kate, not so much because of the murdered neighbor, but because her exit was blocked by all those police officers. Something about walking down a hallway filled with police and crime scene investigators seemed impossible. Kate backed her way into the apartment, breathing through her nostrils and blowing out through her mouth. She calmed herself and picked over the brief conversation with the detective. Was it standard practice after a murder to search the nearby residences? Kate didn’t think so. There must be a reason. She went to the computer and searched for Audrey Marshall. It was a common name, bringing up many genealogy sites and several Facebook profiles. She added Boston to the search and found a blocked LinkedIn profile but with an image attached. She clicked on it. It wasn’t a large image, and it was in black and white, but showed a woman with intensely large eyes and a boy’s short haircut, almost like Jean Seberg’s hair in that movie Breathless. She worked for a publishing house in Boston, and all her previous employment had been in New York City. Kate knew she’d found the right Audrey Marshall. She stared into the pixelated eyes on the computer screen and they stared back at her. I’m dead now, those eyes said, but this is what I looked like when I was alive. Audrey Marshall had been pretty, and Kate wondered if Corbin Dell and she had been involved in any way. They must have known each other, or seen each other frequently when they were coming and going.
Kate stood, knowing what she needed to do. Well, knowing what she wanted to do. She’d search the apartment herself. If the police were going to look around, maybe she’d look around first, and be able to find what they were looking for. It would give her something to do, a purpose. She started her search in the bedroom, going through every drawer, looking for hiding places, lifting the mattress. She was struck, as she had been when she first looked around the place, by the lack of personal items. She did find an old battered bureau in the corner of the walk-in closet that was filled with photographs, most still in their envelopes from the developing place. She quickly flipped through several of them; they were obviously photographs that had belonged to Corbin’s father. Old family vacations. Christmas Day celebrations. A whole roll dedicated to what looked like a vintage Porsche speedster. Where were Corbin’s photographs? On his computer, and his phone, of course, like Kate’s own pictures.