He pointed to one of the doors.
“That one goes to the bedroom next door.”
“Prints on the handle?”
“Just on the other side. Unknowns A and B. Shall we look?”
We went back out to the hall so we could go into the other room without touching anything.
“Unknowns A and B are all over the place. Since B was also found in tucked-away places, we’re guessing that’s the one who owns the room. But that’s an inadmissibly wild-ass guess.”
“You could ask Bobby.”
“We did. He said he never came down here, so he didn’t know. The print evidence more or less proves that.”
“Don’t forget the rubber gloves theory.”
“I don’t forget anything. And I don’t believe anything I can’t see with my own eyes, and even then I’m suspicious.”
“What about C?”
“C is scattered about the house. The only one you find on the furnace and water heater, along with the usual unknowns found nowhere else.”
“The owner and maintenance mechanics.”
“You think?”
He took me out to the patio under the deck where they found the blood trace, and showed me how it led back to the bedroom. Reluctant as I was to bring up the concept of jimmied locks, I asked if the patio door had been forced or messed with in any way.
“Nope. No evidence of that anywhere. It’s some skill to pick a lock, let alone leave no trace of doing it. Takes a real mechanical whiz,” he said, looking at me pointedly.
I put up my hands.
“It’s beyond me.”
We walked the blood path a few more times, me asking questions, him answering as well as he could and jotting down things to check out later. He turned on the recorder a few times to get my official statement on the disposition of the body, the condition of the house, all the stuff he already knew but had to ask to cover him for the warrant that got us back inside.
I wanted to feel more enlightened after walking around the death-impregnated place, but all I felt was confused and disoriented. It made me wish again that I hadn’t found her. Maybe I would have been able to think more clearly if the image of young promise rendered silent and supine wasn’t filling my mind’s eye.
We were back outside and about to get into our cars when I remembered another obvious question.
“You said Dobson was in the City during the week. What does he do?”
“Wall Street, of course,” said Sullivan.
“Like what?”
“Some administrative job.”
“Where?”
He sighed and fished out his case book again, with a look that said this was the last time.
“Eisler, Johnson Consulting, Inc.,” he said. “He’s a help desk administrator, though not much help to me so far.”
THIRTEEN
IT HAD BEEN A WHILE NOW since I first awoke on the screened-in porch of my parents’ cottage, fresh out of rehab and expectations. I’m a little surprised I survived that first year, so indifferent was I to the basic essentials of life. It’s a testament, I guess, to the gene code my parents bestowed on me, their penchant for grim forbearance, their heedless endurance.
Most people are too polite to ask me why I flamed out on the upward arc of my career, why I demolished my marriage and laid waste any future professional prospects. The fact is, I’m not sure why. Or, I’m not ready to understand why. I know it’s supposed to be a big deal to me, this thing that happened. I don’t deny that, but I’m not sure any good can come from dissecting my motivations, plumbing the depths of my soul, my essential being, to root out fundamental, underlying causes.
All I can say is I used to wake in the morning feeling a rich blend of panic and hollow despair. Now I’m merely undecided.
Another improvement is waking up next to Amanda. I remember Abby as The Lump. Amanda’s more like The Volcano. At rest, and then, suddenly, not.
I left her in the big bed in the new room at the back of the house and went to make coffee. Eddie ignored me from the shearling-covered bean bag Amanda gave him to use in the kitchen, the one room in the house without overstuffed furniture.
I’d pulled Eddie out of a pound where all he had to lie on was concrete. Before that, according to the rescue people, he’d been living in the scrub oak north of Westhampton, not exactly four-star accommodations. You wonder how a dog like that can develop such a taste for upholstery.
When Amanda wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later he jumped up and acted like royalty had come to call, assuming Her Majesty liked having a set of paws stuck in her midriff and a wet nose in the kisser.
The air was cool and the lawn was sodden with dew, but I wanted to get all I could out of the last warm months. I passed out sweatshirts and pants and filled Amanda’s arms with worn but stalwart blankets. I brought china mugs and coffee in a big white thermos.
Once settled into the Adirondacks at the edge of the breakwater, we were in a good position to watch the sun slowly turn the Peconic from silver grey to dark blue as it cleared the air of mist and turned the sails across the bay into tiny white blades against the shadowy horizon.
Eddie sat next to my chair and leaned against my leg. I used one hand to hold the mug, the other to scratch a spot near the end of his nose, an attention he found tirelessly agreeable.
“You’re thinking about the Japanese girl,” said Amanda.
“I’m thinking about computers.”
“Why you don’t have one?” she asked.
“Why Iku didn’t have one. Makes no sense. At the company her laptop was like an appendage. And that was at the dawn of email, before wireless broadband and whatever else you people are addicted to.”
“You people? You mean the general population of non-Luddites?”
“Donovan told me the last contact he had with her was an email. There was a Cat 5 connection in Iku’s room. We used Cat 5 to run cabling for distributed control systems. The only purpose it has in a house is broadband Internet.”
“If you get that email you can check the IP address and confirm it came from the rental,” she said.
“I can?”
“Not you, darling. Somebody who knows what an IP address is. Me, for example.”
There was a lot I didn’t know about household technology. But I knew Iku Kinjo couldn’t have survived without it.
“We need to find her computer,” I said.
“We do. After another cup of coffee.”
Before going back down to my shop I checked in with Sullivan. He told me the investigators had noted the broadband connection at a built-in desk in the kitchen, but missed the one in Iku’s bedroom.
“We did get her cell phone records. Incoming and outgoing by the boatload until May 30.”
“Then what?”
“Then nothing,” he said. “She cancelled the service. I guess she’d said all she wanted to say for the year.”
“She used someone else’s phone?” I asked.
“Probably a disposable. Untraceable.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing,” I said.
