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take a walk.”
    “There’s a trailhead on the west side of the clearing. If you follow that, it’ll bring you to the creek. If you’re not back by four, I’ll come find you.”
    I sat for five minutes after he’d gone, then took the lid off both boxes. One held a collection of opened and unopened mail—junk and bills mainly—going back at least three months, plus the other information I’d asked for: insurance documents, 401 (k) and bank statements, birth certificate, apartment lease. The other was Dornan’s private shrine to Tammy. He had saved everything, in no particular order: printouts of e-mails were bundled with birthday cards and Post-it notes; snapshots poked out from cassette cases; there were plane tickets and hotel bills and dinner receipts. On top lay a shopping list.
Slim-Fast
, it said forlornly,
toothpaste, water, dishwasher soap
. I imagined Tammy loading a dishwasher, and the only picture I could get was her playing to an audience: stretching so that her pants pulled tight across thigh and buttock. But her handwriting was not what I’d expected: no circles over the
i
, no fat loops; it was strong and clear and angular, and she had preferred black ink.
    I didn’t want to know what Tammy had said to Dornan via e-mail, what she had whispered late at night to his phone machine; I doubted I’d need to.
    I started with the mail, sorting it quickly into bills, junk, and personal. The junk I put back in the box, the personal—all unopened—I set aside, and the bills I sorted further by date and type, discarding anything before the first of the year. Tammy had not canceled the lease on her apartment, so there was ten months’ worth. All had been paid by Dornan; his notation of check number and date and amount was scrawled in the upper right corner of each. The Visa card pile was significantly smaller than the others; it contained nothing since August. Her other credit card, an American Express, was there in full, though the last three months showed no spending activity. I pulled an example from each pile. The AmEx listed plane tickets, hotel bills, out-of-town restaurant meals. Business expenses. Probably referred immediately to the company she worked—used to work—for. The Visa was billed from a variety of Atlanta restaurants, two different hair salons, Macy’s, Saks, auto repair, pharmacy: purely personal. The conclusions were obvious.
    I found the 800 number on the bill and, while it rang, assembled a few things from the box. A bored, beaten voice answered. “ParkBanc this is Cindy how may I be of service.”
    “Yes, hello. I’m calling about my Visa bill.”
    “Name please.”
    “Tammy Foster.”
    “Account number please.”
    I read off the number. I heard her fingernails ticking on the keyboard even on the cellular phone. “Tammy J. Foster,” she read back to me like a robot. “Last four numbers of your social security number for security purposes.”
    I read them from the bank statement. More plastic ticking. As my partner, Frank King, had said when I was a uniformed rookie in Atlanta,
Finding people’s not rocket science, Torvingen. They got a social security number, it’s easy
—
    “Address please ma’am.”
    “Yes, well that’s why I’m calling. I haven’t had a bill since July, so you probably still have my old Atlanta address.”
    “No ma’am we have a New York City address.”
    “Well, it’s probably the wrong one because, like I said, I haven’t seen a bill since July.”
    “Your account is current ma’am.”
    “Well, that can’t be right. Like I said, you haven’t sent me a bill for months. What address do you have there?”
    “One moment.”
    —
It’s your illegals that are hard to track. Otherwise, hell, just follow the money
. Frank had been right, mostly. The exceptions were dead people, and smart people with no scruples and enough money to pay for both active and passive concealment. Unless Tammy was dead, I could probably do it just from the bits