“It doesn’t make sense. It makes him look guilty, so, if he is guilty, why would he lie? He’d just be caught out.”
“Welcome to my world,” the detective said, then added, “Look. I won’t leave you in the dark. If anything happens with Corbin you’ll be the first to know, or one of the first, I promise.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you have a phone number for the woman who lives in your apartment building, Martha . . .”
“Martha Lambert, yes.”
Kate got her cell phone and gave the detective Martha’s number.
After the detective left, Kate wandered the apartment, looking to see what had been disturbed. But everything, except for maybe the looted den closet, looked the same. She stared through the window out onto Bury Street and caught the detective’s car pulling away toward the river. The day was darker, and the wind had picked up, buffeting and rattling the window. Kate stood frozen for what seemed like several minutes, unable to decide what to do next. The longer she stood, the more anxious she felt. She knew that she needed to do something, but still didn’t move. She could make herself lunch, or do the assignment she’d gotten from her class, or go sketch for a while. Maybe do a portrait of the detective—what was her full name, Roberta James?—while her face was fresh in her mind. And what about Alan? What was she going to do when he came back from work and tried to see her again? He would, wouldn’t he? She couldn’t just hide from him in her apartment. She couldn’t hide forever, could she?
Finally, she willed her feet to move and went and got her laptop. Maybe Martha would be online, and she could ask her again if Corbin had made an appearance at her flat.
She took her computer to the bedroom. She was cold, and got under a blanket on the bed.
She opened her e-mail account, looked for Martha’s name on her list of contacts, but she wasn’t online. Instead, Kate sent her a short e-mail: Any sign of Corbin, or has he totally disappeared? She looked through some of her other e-mails, mostly junk, and considered sending another one to Corbin, when she noticed that his name, down the left bar, had a green dot next to it. That meant he used the same e-mail service as she did, and was currently online. She opened a chat box to him, wrote: Hello there.
And waited. Minutes passed.
She opened another browser page and googled woman cut down middle. Most of what came up had to do with middle-aged women’s haircuts, for some reason. She tried woman cut in half, and there were links to several videos—none that Kate watched—of train and elevator accidents. There were a few links to stories about magicians. Kate tried postmortem mutilation and looked through news stories. There were too many, but she kept scrolling, eventually finding a newspaper article from three years earlier titled “Mutilated Body Identified as Rachael Chess, Nursing Student from Portland, Maine.” Kate clicked on it. It was a local story, from a Gloucester newspaper. The body had been found on a New Essex beach by an early-morning shell collector. Police had not released all details, except to say that they had found postmortem wounds. Kate’s mind immediately flashed to the picture she’d found in Corbin’s box when she’d first searched the apartment. A brunette woman on a beach. Her name, written on the back of the photograph, had been Rachael.
Kate wrestled the blanket off her and got off the bed. She ran across the apartment to the closet in the den, pulling open the door. The boxes were gone, including the one with the photograph. She’d suspected this, having seen a bunch of boxes being toted off as evidence. If the woman in Corbin’s photograph was really the murdered Rachael Chess, then the police would figure that out, as well. She walked back through the living room, then remembered the other photographs she’d found, the ones in the copy of Ender’s Game. She found the book again, took the photos from it, and fanned them out in her hand, the pretty woman with the freckles staring into the camera as it got closer. She carried the photographs back past the kitchen, and heard a scratching sound that made her stop. She went to the kitchen door that led to the basement and listened. Another scratching sound, plus an audible meow. She opened