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Hospital, Bonnie Franer had signed a six-month lease on the three-bedroom house in a quiet central San Diego neighborhood shortly after Christmas. Dar Reinert shared the information with Bo as he drove and wolfed a Mounds bar. The candy's sweetish coconut smell gave the interior of the car a sickly tropical flavor.
    "Why would Franer have signed the lease rather than Massieu?" Bo said from the passenger's seat, trying to ignore the odor. She felt oddly uninvolved with the case, and yet pulled toward some dimension of it that seemed peripheral. Something distant, almost cerebral. If she really decided to quit her job, she realized, this would be her last case. Maybe the nagging tug toward irrelevant facts was just a way of making the break. At least it wasn't manicky. She felt none of the dramatic emotional response that would signal a need for lithium.
    "We ran a check. Massieu's Canadian, not a U.S. citizen," Reinert replied, easing his eight-cylinder Olds diagonally across the driveway of the house. "Some people will only rent to legal citizens. Cuts down on the problem of a bunch of illegal Mexicans renting a place and tearing it apart."
    Bo considered launching an argument that "illegal Mexicans" were no more likely to tear a house apart than, say, "legal Norwegians," but abandoned the idea. What Reinert suggested was often true. A cultural dilemma created when agrarian people from villages as yet unblessed by electricity or modern plumbing walked hundreds of miles to work north of an invisible line called "U.S.-Mexico Border." Unsophisticated people, who might keep chickens in the laundry room of a rental house or cook them over Sterno in the living room. Reinert's expansive maroon car, she noticed, effectively blocked any possible exit from the closed, two-car garage.
    "Nobody's here," she said. The beige stucco ranch with its fading brown shutters and bare, weedy lawn provided a wealth of information. Keenly aware of nuance, Bo missed none of it. "They haven't lived here long, and they don't intend to stay." A network of cracks in the unwatered lawn created a miniature badland. "There aren't any bikes or toys in the yard, which means they haven't bought any. And no personal touches. The house looks exactly as it did when they rented it."
    "Whaddaya mean?" Reinert sniffed, watching the living room picture window for movement. "Place looks okay to me."
    "That's the point," Bo went on. "People invariably mark their living spaces, personalize them. A butterfly decal on the mailbox, plaster St. Francis in the yard. Maybe a plant or a lamp visible in a window. Something that changes the physical structure into a habitation. This place is just a structure. The people haven't created any identity here. Their hearts are someplace else."
    "So?" Reinert opened his door.
    "So they're not going to stay. It's temporary, like a motel room. Nobody feels compelled to personalize a motel room; there's no point."
    "Women pick up stuff like that." The detective nodded fondly as Bo followed him toward the slightly warped front door. She kept to herself the fact that any man with a diagnosis of manic depression would probably exhibit the same sensibilities. It came with the territory.
    The house seeped a sort of breathy grayness, the hallmark of places where no one is. There would, Bo sensed as Reinert removed the Ruger from beneath his blazer, also be no dog or cat. The grayness lacked even an animal presence.
    Dar Reinert's fist thumped on the hollow-core door as he bellowed, "Massieu? Open up. Police."
    Beside the drab rental the adjoining property seemed to have been groomed as a set for a country-and-western video. A picket fence banked with waist-high scarlet geraniums bordered a verdant lawn punctuated by an artistically placed bird-bath, a small gazebo of white lath, and an unidentifiable piece of antique farm equipment. From a bed of Charlotte Armstrong roses between the geraniums a salty male voice roared, "There's nobody home over