I stepped out from the closet and turned toward Bandoni where he was bent over the dresser’s open drawers.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Gym clothes,” Bandoni said. “Socks. Underwear. Some nice fleece pullovers. But mostly gym clothes. And a stash of cash. Five hundred dollars in twenties.”
“He was a member of a local fitness center.”
“We’ll get someone from the squad to pay a visit. Maybe he tried to make a move on someone in the locker room.”
“What gives you that idea?”
He snorted. “’Cause he was fucking gay. You ever seen a man’s bedroom this organized?”
I rolled my eyes.
On each side of the neatly made bed was a nightstand. One held cold medicine. The other an unopened box of condoms—a sign of optimism or an indicator of regular use? No phone or calendar. A graphic novel lay on one nightstand, a bookmark halfway through. The novel appeared to be about a future in which women had taken over.
While I went into the master bathroom and examined an awe-inspiring array of grooming lotions and gels, Bandoni headed toward the hallway.
“Check this out,” he called a minute later.
I closed the medicine cabinet and followed Bandoni’s voice to the back of the house.
“One mystery solved,” he said as I entered the room. “Or deepened.”
The art studio. The room was large and filled with light from the back windows. The drafting table occupied the center of the room, white task lamps clamped to each end. A stool was tucked beneath the desk, while on top lay a single sketchbook.
Bandoni had opened the book. Now he pointed to a drawing. “There she is.”
The sketch showed a Latina sitting at a bistro table in an ice cream shop. She had long, dark hair, soulful black eyes, and a fierce expression. She wore a tight-fitting T-shirt and was tilting the straw in a milkshake glass to her lips. The milkshake was complete with whipped-cream swirls and a cherry on top.
“She looks like Deke’s composite drawing,” I said.
“Spitting image. She’s your engineer’s mysterious woman. And look at her T-shirt.”
Emblazoned on the tee was an inverted triangle containing the shepherd’s staff.
“It’s the tattoo,” I said. “The one on Noah’s bicep.”
“Gorman promised to look through the book this morning. Cross your fingers.”
Behind the lady with the milkshake, another Latina leaned against the wall, her hair spilling out of a ponytail, her hands clutched tight around the handle of a mop. She stared at the other woman—the Milkshake Lady—with exhausted but hopeful eyes.
I lifted my gaze to the wall beyond the desk. The entire space was covered with page after page of both ink and colored drawings of the woman mixed in with sketches of trains, orphan waifs, and barely clad blond women serving—and sometimes servicing—handsome men. There were sketches of men holding assault rifles. One drawing showed men rioting in the street with women cheering them on. There were also sketches of a seriously-pissed-off-looking guy with yellow eyes, his face all but hidden in the shadow of a hoodie.
A smorgasbord of artistic curiosity, lust, and empathy.
The indecipherable mind of Noah Asher.
“Writing code paid for his Gucci loafers,” I said. “But this art is what mattered to him.”
We went over everything carefully, looking for some indication of who the woman was. We found receipts for his art supplies, tickets to comic conventions, books on how to illustrate, ink, and color graphic novels, and letters of encouragement from other writers and illustrators as he pursued a career in comics.
Bandoni found a manila folder filled with photographs of teens and young adults. He spread the pictures out on the drafting table.
“What do you make of these?” he asked.
I looked at each one. Dreadlocks. Homemade tattoos. One kid had his middle finger in the air. Another was sitting in a boxcar, playing a guitar. I glanced at the drawings on the walls, and understanding dawned. Not orphan waifs.
Kids like Purple.
“They’re gutter punks,” I said. “Like the girl I talked with yesterday. Noah wasn’t trying to muscle in on their territory. He was drawing them.”
“Some of these kids look hard-core. Maybe they weren’t too crazy about the idea.”
“Maybe. But I don’t see anyone in these photos who matches the descriptions Purple gave for Damn Fox and Street Cred.”
“Maybe those two didn’t know him. Just witnesses, like they claimed.”
“It still doesn’t explain why Noah was in that dress.”
We took the photos of the kids and kept searching. But we found no hint to the woman’s identity.
“Hell, we don’t even know if she’s real,” Bandoni said with disgust. “Maybe the resemblance between the woman Deke saw and this woman is nothing but coincidence.”
“I don’t like coincidence.”
“It happens. ‘There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio . . .’”
“Are you spouting Hamlet?” I laughed, and he looked wounded.
“Fuck you,” he said. “I’m not a complete troglodyte. You look up L’Amour?”
“Twentieth-century writer of frontier novels. But I can’t quote him. You win this one, Bandoni.”
The wounded look shifted to a certain smugness.
But he was right. Our Milkshake Lady was perhaps nothing more than Noah’s fantasy, a woman created for his comics. Maybe Noah was catering to new markets, finding his readers among women and minorities.
But whatever strangeness existed in the world, I still hated coincidences. And there was something about the woman in the illustrations. She didn’t look like the overly stylized women I’d seen in comics drawn by men. Her breasts were large, but not to a degree that defied physics. Her face was full and round rather than classically beautiful, and her features were far from perfect. Her hair, thick and dark, was her best feature.
She looked real.
Unlike the sweet-faced woman in Deke’s sketch, though, the Milkshake Lady looked angry. And tough. Like she could kick anyone’s ass.
My mind flicked back to the piece of paper downstairs. Our anger is righteous.
Bandoni rubbed the back of his neck, turning his head back and forth as if
