Since I had already done it once before, it took me about a minute to jimmy the lock. The room was as I'd left it. If DeSpain had gone through it, he'd done it neatly. There was a bed sitting room, a kitchen and a bath. The bath was tiled. The other two rooms were finished in plywood paneling. There was a pink satin spread on the bed.

"You should look around, Mei Ling. See if anything appears odd. Anything that should be here and isn't. Anything that is here and shouldn't be. Anything you don't expect."

Mei Ling stood in the middle of the room and looked around.

"May I open drawers and closets and things?"

"Yes."

She did. She was quite organized about it. She began at the far end of the bed sitting room and moved methodically through it and the kitchen and finally the bath. I leaned on the wall near the kitchen counter and watched her as she worked. Her face was serious, and a small concentration wrinkle appeared vertically between her eyebrows. Her front teeth showed as she bit down gently on her lower lip while she carefully looked at everything.

"Her makeup is not here," Mei Ling said.

"Neither is her purse."

"It would make sense," I said, "for her to have her purse when she was kidnapped. Is it reasonable to imagine that she would have kept her makeup in her purse?"

"Is this an attractive woman?" Mei Ling said.

"An actress, one who cares about her appearance?"

"Yeah."

"Then, no, sir. She would have had lipstick in her purse, and maybe blusher and a little something to touch up her eyes. But she would not have carried everything in her purse." Mei Ling smiled.

"There is too much. Her bathroom is not well lighted. There is no window. She would have had a magnifying mirror, perhaps one with built-in lighting. She would have had a hair dryer. She would have had night cream, and moisturizer, and foundation, and eye shadow, and mascara, and…" Mei Ling spread her hands helplessly.

"So much. And besides, her whole organizer is gone."

"A makeup organizer?"

"Yes."

"You know she would have one?"

Mei Ling smiled at me almost condescendingly.

"Yes, sir."

"Anything else?" I said.

"I don't know what she had for luggage," Mei Ling said.

"But there is no suitcase."

"Yeah," I said.

"I noticed that too, but at the time it wasn't what I was looking for."

"Her tooth brush and tooth paste are still here," Mei Ling said.

"Yeah. But a lot of people keep an extra already packed."

"What does this mean, sir?"

"Maybe Jocelyn packed for her kidnapping," I said.

"Who would let her do that?"

"Nobody," I said.

CHAPTER 44

I was alone in Port City. I needed to think, and I was beyond caring whether the Death Dragons and Lonnie Wu liked it or not. The sky was dark, the wind was brisk off the Atlantic, but the rain was gentle, drifting a little on the wind. I walked along Ocean Street, parallel to the water, away from the theater, with the collar up on my black leather jacket and my matching White Sox baseball cap pulled down over my forehead. I had the Browning out of its holster and in my right-hand coat pocket, because if the Death Dragons did, in fact, protest my presence, it would be embarrassing if my gun was out of the rain, dry and cozy, zipped up under my jacket. Most of the fishing boats were in harbor, and their masts clustered near the shore, bobbing briskly on choppy water the color of macadam, the herring gulls roosting on them and on the pilings along the piers. One of them planed off its perch and snatched a piece of garbage from the sullen water. The thing that had been skittering intangibly along the edges of my consciousness coalesced suddenly. Like a name I'd been trying to think of.

I turned and went back to the theater, walking fast; in the front door, past the box office, up the stairs and into the big empty conference room galleried with theater posters. I walked straight to the one advertising the Port City Theater Company's 1983 production of The Trials of Emily Edwards.

Neatly framed. One of fifty, it was a stylized portrait of a young woman with black hair tied to a chair and gagged with a white scarf. She was wearing a black slip and black high-heeled shoes, or, more accurately, one black high-heeled shoe. The other shoe lay on the floor in front of her. The strap of her slip was off her left shoulder. There was no bra strap. Her ankles and knees were bound with clothesline. Several loops of the same rope around her waist held her in the chair. The white scarf appeared to be silk. It covered her face from nose to chin. Her dark hair had fallen forward and covered her right eye. It was identical to Jocelyn's predicament on the tape. She had learned how to kidnap herself, by copying a play poster.

"Jesus Christ," I said. It came out very loud in the empty conference room.

I took the poster off its hook and with me as I left the theater.

Nobody stopped me. No one said, "Hey, boy, where you going with that poster?" No one, in fact, paid any attention to me at all.

If a detective falls in the forest, I thought, does he make a sound?

I took the poster to my car and drove home to Susan's.

When I got there, I went quietly with my poster past her waiting room. For a moment I thought of going in. Excuse me, doctor, but I think I need vocational counseling. Instead I went on upstairs. I put my hat on her hall table so she'd see it when she came up from her afternoon appointments and not be startled when she came in. I let myself in to Susan's apartment with my key, accepted, with considerably more grace than pleasure, three minutes of intense lapping from Pearl, then took my coat off and made myself a double vodka martini on the rocks with a twist. I put my poster on top of the TV, put the video tape in the VCR, clicked play, waited until Jocelyn was on the screen, and clicked the freeze-frame button. Freeze frame was not state of the art on Susan's VCR, but it was sufficient.

Then Pearl and I got on the couch and looked at the likeness while I sipped my martini and thought about the detective business. Pearl made an occasional attempt on my martini, which I repelled. After a couple of failures she gave up and turned around twice and lay down with her head on the arm of the couch and her butt against my leg.

I had been in Port City now, with three employees, since, approximately, the time that Hector was a pup. And the only fact I had was that Craig Sampson had been shot dead in front of me on the stage at the Port City Theater. The only person in Port City who had told me anything useful was Lonnie Wu, who had threatened to kill me, and even he had exaggerated. Though in defense of Lonnie, I was harder to kill than he had expected.

My drink was gone. I got up to get another one. Pearl turned her head and looked at me with annoyance. I made a shaker of martinis and came back and sat again. Pearl sighed and rearranged herself once more.

"Yeah," I said to her.

"I know."

I stared at the two images. Jocelyn must have set her video camera on a tripod and then sat in her chair and tied the scarf over her mouth. She could then have tied her ankles and knees together, looped the rope through the chair rungs, wrapped it around her waist and held it behind her with her unbound hands. It would enable her to struggle realistically, and to make muffled sounds through the scarf, and set herself free by simply letting go of the rope behind her and then untying her legs. She could have done all this with the tape running and then gone into her bound-and helpless act for five minutes or so and then erased the tape up to the point she'd started her act.