“He’s been experimenting with this stuff recently. It’s nice to see him branching out.”

On one of the tables I find a black sketchbook underneath a smooth kidney-shaped rock. The pages are filled with portraits – creaky, literal-minded, two-dimensional sketches that hover somewhere in the gray zone between folk art and simple inability. The pictures are all of the same woman, round-faced with flowing black hair, full lips and closed eyes. If the misshapen heads elicit revulsion, these earnest attempts at photo-realism induce pity. I turn the book so Ms. Fanning can have a look.

“I’ve never seen these before,” she says, taking the sketchbook in hand, flipping the pages slowly. She bites her lip.

“I think they’re meant to be you.”

She laughs. “I doubt that.” Then, frowning. “They don’t look like me, do they?”

I answer with a noncommittal shrug. But yes, they do. Stephanie Thomson’s suspicions come to mind, the fear that her husband had gotten involved with one of his fellow artists. Maybe there was more truth to this than she realized.

“How often would you say Joe was down here?” I ask, glancing into a couple of boxes on a nearby shelf, which contain mostly clay-covered books and abandoned tools.

She’s still transfixed by the sketches. “I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a week. I’ve been here constantly – I’ve got a show coming up – and I’ll typically see him early in the morning, sometimes late at night. He’s unpredictable, I guess you could say. The way it seems to work for him is, he gets this inspiration and rushes over here to do something about it.”

“Always the same inspiration, it looks like.” I pick up one of the heads. It’s surprisingly light. Plaster dust transfers to my hands.

“He’s one of those people who can’t get it to come out right. So he keeps doing it, different variations, like he’s obsessed, you know? There’s a shape in his mind, a certain face, and he keeps trying to capture it again and again.”

She closes the sketchbook and returns it to the table, putting the rock back on top. The halting repetition of her own face on the page has given her pause. I can see the wheels turning as she realizes the implications of her own words. Hers was one of the shapes in his mind, the latest obsession. Before letting her leave, I ask all the usual questions, but she can’t say whether Joe seemed depressed or not, whether he’d been behaving differently.

“Had he given away any prized possessions?”

“No,” she says, then pauses. “When he was up here a couple of days ago, I did hear him talking to Vance – that’s the guy next door – asking him to hold on to a box of stuff. He said he didn’t have room for it.”

Glancing along the shelves, I find that a little hard to believe.

“He gave it to this Vance individual, and not you?”

“We weren’t that close.” Her eyes cut to the sketchbook. “Really.”

“You have a number for this guy?”

She crosses the hallway, retrieving a BlackBerry from her purse, scrolling through the numbers to find the right one. I copy Vance’s information into my notepad, then thank her. As she leaves, I have the feeling she hasn’t told me everything. I get that a lot, and sometimes it’s hard to know whether what’s being held back is important or not. One thing I’m fairly certain about. When Jill Fanning said she was not close to Joe, that was a lie.

I leave a message for Vance, asking him to get in touch as soon as possible, then try Cavallo’s number again. She doesn’t pick up, so I call the station, which routes me over to the task force desk, where a secretary asks me to hold. A few minutes later, Wanda’s voice comes on the line.

“Theresa isn’t here,” she says. “She took a personal day.”

“Oh. Well, I guess you heard about my new assignment?”

“Congratulations. I can tell you, your friend Lieutenant Rick is green with envy. He’s been scampering all over the place looking for a way off this sinking ship.” She frames the observation as an ironic joke, but her tone is pure bitter. “I just spent the last half hour listening to him argue why, in spite of being here to handle the media, it shouldn’t be him in front of the camera. He’s afraid having his face associated with this would tank his career.”

I’m not sure what to say to that. There’s a reason why I’ve never had the urge to chase after rank. Listening to the resignation in her voice, I feel guilty for abandoning her team, even if it was at my captain’s request. Guilty but also relieved, which makes me feel even worse.

“I’ll talk to her later,” I say, hanging up.

Downtown, back at my own desk, I start working my way through Thomson’s personal effects, broken down into a series of inventoried evidence bags. Most of these things I examined quickly at the scene, but I have some time to kill before heading over to see the medical examiner, so I might as well use it.

I locate the bag containing Thomson’s phone, then limber up my writing hand for some extensive transcription. We have software to do all this, but call me old-fashioned. I like to do some jobs myself. Every call he placed, every call he received, every call he missed, I record them all. Then I work my way through his programmed numbers, seeing what I can find. Jill Fanning is there, though no calls have been recently placed to her or received from her. There’s no listing for Vance, but the number she gave me is on the list of placed calls two days back.

This morning’s incoming calls are all from Stephanie. Just after midnight, though, he received one from Reg Keller’s home, and then he placed one to a number I recognize, Tony Salazar’s mobile phone.

On the back of the phone there’s a peephole camera. I thumb my way through the menu layers, then find Joe Thomson’s stored photos. They’re the usual jagged, low-quality images, random photos of the skyline, of himself, of the world viewed from behind his steering wheel. There’s one of Stephanie grilling in the backyard, her moving hand blurring her face. Nothing surprising.

The last picture on the roll is the exception.

It’s worse than the others, taken in dim light, the face not much more than a white smudge framed in black, the features vague. The torso, equally washed out, cropped halfway down the chest. If I hadn’t seen the sketches, if I hadn’t just come from meeting Jill Fanning in the flesh, I’m not sure I could have made the identification. All I could have told from the picture is that the woman’s eyes were closed, and she was undressed.

But since I did just see the sketches and meet Ms. Fanning in the flesh, since I heard her tell me the two of them weren’t close and recognized it immediately as a lie, I don’t have much trouble imagining who this woman is, or what it means that Joe Thomson carried around a photo of her in the nude. His wife’s suspicions are more than confirmed. I’ll have to have another talk with the woman now.

Remembering Stephanie, though, my thumb hovers over the erase button. Bascombe had a point earlier. The man killed himself. You don’t have to trash his memory. Ignorance being bliss, it might be better for his wife to go on thinking she was wrong, that there was nothing between Thomson and this other woman. I can spare her this much with the push of a button.

But like I said, I don’t have the whitewash gene. Part of me wants to cover for him – not so much for his sake as for hers – but I know deep down that the unvarnished truth is better than even a well-meaning deception. I’m not here to pretty things up, to give Stephanie Thomson or anyone else a reassuring vision of the world as she thinks it is. All I have to do is uncover the way things really are. I didn’t make them that way, and I don’t have the power to change them. Even if it’s tempting to think I do.

My thumb moves away from the button and I turn the phone off. Maybe she’ll find the photo once his effects are released, and maybe she won’t. That’s not my decision to make.