Wilson said, “That sounds like an Agatha Christie book.”

“I know what it sounds like,” Lucas said. “But you need to cover this, Jerry-we need to find Gabriella. I'll talk to her boyfriend, but I could use some cops spread out behind me, talking to her other friends.”

“Okay. You got names? And I'll tell you what-that window wasn't broken day before yesterday.”

“I'll get you names and phone numbers,” Lucas said. “If you find her, God bless you, but I've got a bad feeling about this.” Lucas was on his cell phone, looked back to the house, where Lucy Coombs was locking the front door. “I've got a feeling she's gone.”

Lucy Coombs wanted to come along when Lucas confronted Ron Stack, the artist boyfriend.

Lucas told her to go home and get on the phone, and he lied to her: “There's an eighty percent chance that she's at a friend's house or out for coffee. We've just got to run her down, and anything you can do to help…”

On the way to Stack's place, Lucas called Carol: “Have you seen Shrake?”

“Yes, but I'm not sure he saw me. He's getting coffee, and he needs it. His eyes are the color of a watermelon daiquiri.”

“Fuck him. Tell him to meet me at the Parkside Lofts in Lowertown. Ten minutes.”

When Lucas got back downtown, Shrake was sitting on a park bench across the street from Stack's apartment building. He got shakily to his feet when Lucas pulled into the curb. He was a tall man in a British-cut gray suit and white shirt, open at the collar. His eyes, as Carol said, were Belgian-hare pink, and he was hungover.

“I hope we're gonna kill something,” he said, when Lucas got out of the car. “I really need to kill something.”

“I know. I talked to Jenkins this morning,” Lucas said. “We're looking for an artist.

His girlfriend disappeared last night.” Lucas told him about it as they crossed the street.

The Parkside was a six-story building, a onetime warehouse, un-profitably converted to loft apartments, with city subsidies, and was now in its fourth refinancing. They rode up to the top floor in what had been a freight elevator, retained either for its boho cool or for lack of money. For whatever reason, it smelled, Lucas thought, like the inside of an old gym shoe.

As they got off the elevator, Lucas's cell phone rang. Lucas looked at the Caller ID: the medical examiner's office. He said, “I've got to take this.”

The ME: “You know, I like doing dogs,” he said. “It's a challenge.”

“Find anything good?” Lucas asked.

“A lot of people think all we can do is routine, run-of-the-mill dissections and lab tests, like it's all cut-and-dried,” the ME said. “That's not what it's about, is it? It's a heck of a lot more than that…”

“Listen, we'll have lunch someday and you can tell me about it,” Lucas said. “What happened with the dog?”

“You're lying to me about the lunch. You're just leading me on…”

“What about the fuckin' dog?” Lucas snarled.

“Pipe,” the ME said. “I did Bucher-and man, if it ain't the same pipe, it's a brother or a cousin. The dog's skull was crushed, just like Bucher's and Peebles's, and the radius of the crushing blow is identical. I don't mean somewhat the same, I mean, identical. We got mucho blood samples, but I don't know yet whether they're human or dog.”

“Give me a guess,” Lucas suggested.

“My guess is, it's human,” the ME said. “It looks to me like the mutt was chewing on somebody. We've got enough for DNA, if it's human.”

“That's great,” Lucas said. “And the pipe…”

“You're hot,” the ME said. “You're onto something.”

“Get a break?” Shrake asked, when Lucas rang off.

“Maybe, but not on Gabriella.”

Ron Stack was in 610. Lucas knocked on the door, and a moment later a balding, bad-tempered, dark-complected man peered out at them over a chain. He was wearing a nasal spreader on his nose, the kind football players use to help them breathe freely. He was holding a cup of coffee and had a soul patch under his thin lower lip. “What?”

Lucas held up his ID. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We're investigating the disappearance of Gabriella Coombs,” Lucas said.

Stack's chin receded into his throat. “Disappearance? She disappeared?”

“You're the last person we know for sure who saw her. Can we come in?”

Stack turned and looked back into his loft, then at Lucas again. “I don't know. Maybe I should call my lawyer.”

“Well, whatever you want to do, Mr. Stack, but we aren't going anywhere until you talk to us. I can have a search warrant down here in twenty minutes if you want to push us. But it'd be a lot easier to sit on the couch and talk, than having you on the floor in handcuffs, while we tear the place apart.”

“What the fuck? Is that a threat?” His voice climbed an octave.

From behind Stack, a woman's voice said, “Who's that, Ron?”

Stack said, “The police.”

“What do they want?” the woman asked.

“Shut up. I'm trying to think.” Stack scratched his chin, then asked, “Am I a suspect?”

“Absolutely,” Lucas said.

Shrake, the nice guy: “Look, all we're doing is trying to find Gabriella. We don't know where she's gone. She's involved in another case, and now…”

“Okay,” Stack said. “I'm gonna push the door shut a little so I can take the chain off.”

He did, and let them in.

The loft was an open cube with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. The other three walls were concrete block, covered with six-foot-wide oil paintings of body parts. The place smelled of turpentine, broccoli, and tobacco.

A kitchen area, indicated by a stove, refrigerator, and sink gathered over a plastic-tile floor, was to their left; and farther to the left, a sitting area was designated by an oriental carpet. A tall blond woman, who looked like Gabriella Coombs, but was not, sat smoking on a scarlet couch.

At the other end of the cube, a door stood open, and through the open door, Lucas could see a towel rack: the bathroom. Overhead, a platform was hung with steel bars from the fifteen-foot ceiling, with a spiral staircase going up. Bedroom.

At the center of the cube was an easel, on a fifteen-foot square of loose blue carpet; against the right wall, three battered desks with new Macintosh computer equipment.

Shrake wandered in, following Lucas, sniffed a couple of times, then tilted his head back and took in the paintings. “Whoa. What is this?”

“My project,” Stack said, looking around at all the paintings. There were thirty of them, hung all the way to the ceiling, all along one wall and most of the end wall. One showed the palm of a hand, another the back of the hand. One showed a thigh, another a hip, one the lower part of a woman's face. “I unwrapped a woman.” He paused, then ventured, “Deconstructed her.”

“It's like a jigsaw puzzle,” Shrake asked.

Stack nodded. “But conceptually, it's much more than that. These are views that you could never see on an actual woman. I took high-resolution photographs of her entire body, so you could see every pore and every hair, and reproduced them here in a much bigger format, so you can see every hair and pore. You couldn't do that, just looking at somebody. I call it Outside of a Woman. It was written up last month in American Icarus.”

“Wow, it's like being there,” Shrake enthused. He pointed: “Like this one: you're right there inside her asshole.”

Wrong foot, Lucas thought. To Stack: “We can't find Gabriella. Her mother tells us that you were out together last night, and Gabriella broke it off with you…” “Who's Gabriella?” the woman asked.

“How ya doing?” Shrake asked. He winked at her, and pointed up at the paintings.

“Is this you?”

“No,” the woman said, with frost.

“Gabriella's a potential model,” Stack said to her. Then to Lucas: “Look, she didn't break anything off, because there was nothing to break off. We went down to Baker's Square and had a sandwich, and we couldn't make a deal on my new project, and I said, 'Okay' and she said, 'Okay' and that was it. She took off.” He shrugged and pushed his hands into his jeans pocket.