under her translucent skin. She felt for its bottom ridge with her index finger and tried to push it out, but it was in deep. I’ll deal with it upstairs, she thought, and was about to relock the padlock, when she felt a sudden compulsion to look again at the posters. There had been something odd about the one of the girl with the large breasts. She opened the door and went to the posters, pulling it out. The frame was incredibly light. There was a darkish line that ran down the center of the poster. That was what had brought Kate back. The sides of the posters were held by thin plastic frames—Kate pulled the top one off, and the sides fell away. The thin transparent plastic covering the poster slid away as well, and Kate saw that the poster had been sliced down the middle. The line she’d seen had been a cut, and half the poster fluttered to the floor, landing face up so that Kate was looking at half a woman, severed down the middle.
The blood rushed from Kate’s head and she felt cold all over. She crouched, instinctively, to pick up the poster half and try to put it all back together, then abandoned the idea and decided to get out of the storage unit, out of the basement.
She backed away, shutting the door, and locking it this time.
She turned to go, but a flash of movement from the shadows behind one of the water heaters caught her eye. She stopped and listened, heard scratching noises, then crouched and saw Sanders emerge, something in his jaws. He turned toward her, his eyes two buttons of reflective yellow. She tried to make out what he had caught. It was either a small rat or a large mouse. He dropped it to the floor and it moved sluggishly away. Sanders leapt and pinned it under his paws. Then Sanders looked directly at Kate and hissed loudly.
Kate left the basement on hollow legs. What did the mutilated poster mean? Was it possible that the poster had been folded and had, over time, separated at the crease? No, not really possible. The poster wasn’t torn, it was deliberately cut. Deliberately cut, then reframed. Did Corbin have some kind of sick fantasy about mutilating a woman? A fantasy that he had finally enacted with Audrey Marshall? Kate reentered the apartment and stood for a moment, thinking, tapping her fingertips together in a deliberate pattern.
Back in her living room, Kate heard a commotion in the hallway. She looked through the peephole, just in time to see Detective James removing the police tape from Audrey Marshall’s door while a middle-aged couple—Audrey’s parents—waited quietly. They looked older than Kate would have imagined. The woman used one of those canes with a large four-pronged base. Maybe they’d had Audrey late, or maybe these were grandparents. With the tape clear and the door open, the detective led the couple into the apartment while two uniformed officers remained in the hall. Kate stopped watching, went to the kitchen to get a drink of water.
A knock came at the door, sooner than she expected, and she let in Detective James, plus one of the uniformed officers.
“I need to talk with you,” Kate said to the detective as she crossed the threshold.
“Okay. Let’s sit.”
The uniformed officer—a young black man with a shaved head—seemed to know what to do without being told. He went toward the kitchen, pulling on gloves. Kate tried hard to not look at the holstered gun on his belt.
The detective sat on the edge of the couch, smoothed out the legs of her black pantsuit, and said, “Are you okay? You look a little upset.”
“Was Audrey Marshall mutilated?”
The detective’s face didn’t change, but Kate thought she saw an alteration in her eyes. A look of interest, and also concern. “Where did you hear that?”
“I met a woman in a class I’m taking, and she told me that she’d read it on the Internet. And then I heard from someone else that he’d also seen it online, in the comments section of an article that he’d read.” Kate was aware that she hadn’t mentioned that one of the sources of her information was Alan Cherney, but if the detective asked, she’d tell her. She’d decided to tell her everything.
Detective James nodded slowly at the information. She seemed to be considering her options. “Without going into too much detail, Kate, yes, Audrey Marshall, after she was dead,