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shirts that shows your belly button.”
    “Was she tall?”
    “Hell yes.”
    “Was she thin or heavyset?”
    “She was thin all right, and her skin had no color to it. Probably a drug user.” She paused, then continued, “She had bushy black hair and a tattoo, some kind of funny-looking symbol sticking out of her pants, just below her navel.”
    Elliot nodded. “You mentioned that the visitors were different this time. What kind of people usually go in and out of the apartment?”
    “Oh, they’re a weird bunch, mostly skinny white guys with long hair, like bikers or hippies or something like that. Maybe twenty-five to thirty years old. Sometimes they play music, but never the television. They’re usually pretty quiet, except for tramping up and down the hallway. Guy last night, he’d seen fifty some time ago, and he was dressed like a businessman.” She paused and leaned forward, as if she were telling Elliot a secret. “I think the place is rented just to buy and sell drugs.”
    Elliot glanced at Dombrowski, and the expression on his face said he wasn’t paying much attention to any of this because he was heading to the same conclusion he’d been heading to since their arrival at Windhall Apartments: He thought the victim was a transient who’d simply had too much of his style of pain relief. Dombrowski turned and headed for the door. “Thank you, Ms. Martin. You’ve been most helpful.”
    Elliot followed Dombrowski out of Stella Martin’s apartment and into the hallway, where several reporters had gathered. Dombrowski smiled. “I’ll question the other residents. You take care of this.”
    Knowing he had no other choice, Elliot turned toward the reporters. There were only three of them. The media must have shared Dombrowski’s conviction; there wasn’t much to this. One of them, a nicely dressed man accompanied by a cameraman, stepped forward, identifying himself into the microphone as Gary Myers. “Could you tell us what happed here, Mister . . . ?”
    “Elliot. Detective Elliot. A body was found inside one of the apartments. We haven’t identified the victim, a white male, probably in his late fifties.”
    “You used the word victim. That usually indicates foul play. Will a murder investigation follow?”
    “A slip of the tongue,” Elliot said. “I meant to say deceased. It appears he died of a drug overdose, heroin, we suspect.”
    The reporter’s face grew serious. “There are rumors of a drug war in Tulsa. Could this be related?”
    “No,” Elliot said, “Nothing like that. The victim’s history—” He paused. There was that word again. “The deceased’s history might reveal something other than what we think we see here, perhaps a hard-luck story of some kind.”
    Elliot stopped, realizing he’d said too much. He glanced around but didn’t see Dombrowski. He was thankful for that. Then again, Dombrowski would see it on the broadcast. Elliot wondered if he might convince Mr. Myers to edit that part out, then figured it wouldn’t be worth the try. “There will be a thorough investigation,” Elliot said, “but we don’t expect to find much.”
    A few questions later, the reporters gave up. Elliot caught up with Dombrowski.
    They questioned the other residents but didn’t get much information. The crime scene investigators had already gotten what they needed, so Elliot and Dombrowski talked with the uniformed officers until all of the team members were out of the building, then they gathered their overcoats and left as well, stepping out into the snow.
    Neither of them spoke during their trek back to the car, and once there it felt good to climb into the cab and get out of the wind. Dombrowski started the engine and pulled onto the street. “What do you say we get a bite to eat?”
    Elliot didn’t feel much like eating. He couldn’t stop thinking about the strange symbol carved into the kitchen table in apartment 3. The coloring of the wood said it was recent. He suspected