Neil McMahon - To The Bone

They drove to Eden Hale's apartment, on Twenty-fifth Avenue, near Irving Street.

The building was not luxurious, but it was nice – several stories of whitish concrete, post-war, with a glass-doored lobby and small but – well kept grounds. Most of the apartments had a view, with the north-facing ones overlooking Golden Gate Park.

"What do you figure these go for?" Larrabee said. "Couple grand a month, minimum?"

Monks nodded. Minimum.

They rang the outside bell for the superintendent. He appeared after a minute, an earnest-looking Hispanic man who could have been forty or sixty. Monks and Larrabee showed him their respective licenses, while Larrabee explained that they would like to look around Ms. Hale's apartment for just a few minutes. A twenty-dollar bill was artfully presented, and accepted, in the process.

The super took them up to the third floor and down a quiet hallway. "Her mother and father came here yesterday," he said, taking out keys. "They took some things, her personal stuff, you know. They gonna send a mover for the furniture." His serious brown eyes looked from one to the other of them. "There some kind of trouble here?"

"No," Larrabee said. "Just some questions we're trying to clear up. Wait, if you want. We won't take long."

The apartment was a one-bedroom, beige – carpeted, with a couch, coffee table, dining set, and a few other pieces of furniture. There was a home entertainment center, with TV, VCR, and stereo, and two cordless phones, one in the front room and one by the bed. It was all good quality, and new. But it was oddly impersonal, giving the feel of a waiting room rather than a place where someone actually lived.

If there had been any photographs or other personal touches, they had been removed. The queen-sized bed had been stripped and the bathroom and medicine cabinet cleared. Monks kept an eye out for bloodstains, in case the paramedics had underreported her blood loss, and the salmonella had been more advanced than it had seemed. But there was nothing he could see on the carpet, and the couple of faint small stains on the mattress had the look of dried menstrual bleeding.

There was nothing under the sink but dish soap, a couple of sponges, and a spray bottle of 409. The refrigerator was empty, and the plastic trash can contained only a few crumpled, makeup-smeared tissues. Monks suspected that these had come from Eden's distraught mother. Whatever Eden might have eaten to give her the salmonella was gone.

Only two things remained that gave a sense of Eden herself. One was her reading material – dozens of issues of Cosmopolitan, other women's magazines, and fashion catalogs, stacked on tables or just lying around. The other was her clothes. One closet was stuffed, bristling with outfits that looked wild, sexy – on the cutting edge of fashion, he supposed, for the circle she had moved in. At least twenty pairs of shoes spilled out of a basket and littered the floor, with spike heels and boots predominant. Her lingerie drawer was another echo, packed with bras and panties that tended toward the colorfully skimpy.

But the other closet was a surprise. It had only a dozen outfits, dresses and blouse-skirt combinations, neatly hung. These were much more conservative, the sort of things professional women picked out carefully at exclusive shops. They looked mostly unworn, with the tags still on.

Larrabee looked at this closet longer than he had the other one. Then he turned back to the super, who was waiting politely in the doorway.

"Has anybody else been here?" Larrabee asked. "Besides her parents?"

The super shook his head. "Just the ambulance guys."

"How about her boyfriend? He said he talked to you that morning."

"Yeah, but I just told him what happened and he went straight to the hospital."

"You're sure he hasn't been back since?" Larrabee said.

"He don't have keys."

Larrabee stared. "No kidding? The guy she was going to marry?"

"She didn't want him coming around all the time. She told me. I think they fought about it, you know?"

"I guess they would," Larrabee said. "How long did she live here?"

The super thought about it. "Maybe four months."

"Any other regular visitors?"

"It didn't seem like it. I'm not here all the time, you know. But I don't think she had, like, girlfriends or anything."

"Do you know where she worked?"

"She told me she's a model. But it seemed like mostly when she went out, she went shopping. Or at night."

"With her boyfriend?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes alone."

"No other men friends?"

"Nobody I saw."

Larrabee nodded, apparently satisfied with what he had gotten. "Okay. We may be back." Another twenty-dollar bill appeared and disappeared. "Thanks again."

"Nada," the super said.

Outside in the van, Larrabee started the engine. "Looks to me like she was trying to change her life," he said. "Going from a bad girl to a good one. A new, upscale wardrobe. And no key for the old boyfriend."

Dreyer had used the term fiancé, but that could mean a lot of things, and it was looking like it had meant something different to him than to her. Or he might just have been lying. It seemed clear that she had been distancing herself from him.

"I got that, too," Monks said. "But not much else."

"Yeah, but there's something that wasn't there. An answering machine."

"Her parents could have taken it," Monks said. But he remembered that the phones themselves were still there. It seemed odd that they would take just the machine.

"Maybe," Larrabee said. "Or she had one of those voice-mail services. But if she did have a machine, especially if it was digital, which just about all of them are these days, the messages are likely to be recoverable, even if they've been erased."

"What are you saying?"

"Just my evil mind at work. Wondering if somebody else snagged it – afraid their voice might get identified."

"Dreyer?"

"Maybe there was something on there he got worried about. Like they'd argued, and he threatened her. He could have taken it that night, while she was knocked out. Or made copies of her keys, and come back when the super wasn't around. You got his address?"

Monks checked in his shirt pocket and pulled out the slip of paper he had copied from the Emergency Room.

"Haver Street. Looks like a few blocks west of Van Ness."

Larrabee leaned out the window to check the side mirror, then pulled into traffic.

"I can't wait to meet him," Larrabee said.

Ray Dreyer's building was a very different order of business from Eden Hale's – an old Victorian that had been chopped up into apartments, like a lot of others in the area, and like many of them, down-at-heels. The street was lined with distinctly unglamorous cars, the sidewalk cracked and gummy. The apartment windows were not open to the light and filled with plants, like in some of the city's other areas. Most were heavily curtained. In the entry, there was an old intercom system that looked defunct. Dreyer's name was not listed next to any of the buzzers, anyway. Only a couple names were.

They got back in Larrabee's van and punched Dreyer's number on the speakerphone. The same machine answered as last time.

"It's Dr. Monks, Ray. Pick up if you're there. This is important."

The phone clicked. Dreyer said, "Yeah?" in a tone that managed to sound both indolent and impatient.

"I'm outside your place," Monks said. "I want to come in and talk to you."

"What about?"

"Eden."

"We talked about Eden. I got nothing more to say."

"Some new questions have come up," Monks said.

"You can tell them to my lawyer. You're going to be talking to him anyway."

"I'm going to be talking to your lawyer? What about?"