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going to stay?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. Haven’t really thought about it.”
    â€œI have a small office building on Couch that is awaiting the funds to renovate it. It has a small apartment on the second floor. The former owner lived there. You could stay there, cut down on your overhead.”
    â€œThat’s a great idea. Thanks for the offer.”
    â€œWe will call it even for your efforts with Mr. Stout.”
    Nando was right, of course. I couldn’t afford to take a financial hit on this case. Not to worry, I told myself, chances are it won’t go anywhere.

Chapter Six
    When I drove up to the gate that night, my dog Archie greeted me with a fusillade of high-pitched yelps while jumping up and down and spinning madly in circles. You really can’t beat the greeting an Aussie gives you, especially a hungry one. I fed him first, then took out a nice slab of Chinook salmon I had defrosting in the fridge and slapped it on the grill. That, together with some greens from the garden, roasted red potatoes, and a glass of Sancerre, made a fine meal.
    After dinner I cleared the table in the kitchen and placed the contents of Picasso’s briefcase in front of me—a three-inch-thick file folder and two thumb drives. It felt good to have something substantive to focus on, and I found myself wondering how much my decision to help Picasso was influenced by the sheer distractive power of a cold case. I read through the printed material first, taking a few notes and marking interesting items in her appointment book with sticky notes. When I came to the thumb drives containing his mother’s back-up computer files, I groaned out loud. Each drive had dozens of pages of documents and emails. What did I expect from a reporter?
    It would take hours to read through everything, so I decided to focus only on the most recent thumb drive. It wasn’t full like the other one, covering from early February of 2005 up to the day she disappeared, May 18. I printed out everything that looked relevant to her disappearance.
    The entire task took a little better than two hours, at which point I made myself a cappuccino and gave Archie a bone to gnaw on before sitting back down. I’d put the promising items into a stack and tossed the rest aside. The good news was that the stack was short, but that was the bad news, too. It contained Nicole Baxter’s appointment book, printouts of four emails she had sent before disappearing, and in what I assumed was Picasso’s handwriting, a note that gave the names and addresses of two of his mother’s friends and three of her colleagues at work. That was it.
    Furthermore, I didn’t see anything pointing to a connection between the boyfriend, Conyers, and Weiman, the fishing cabin owner, nor was there any obvious connection between Nicole Baxter and Weiman. This didn’t particularly surprise me—the fruit is seldom on the low branches.
    From the news articles covering the disappearance, I learned Baxter had gone missing on a Friday night, after having a drink with a woman named Cynthia Duncan, one of the friends Picasso had listed. The article stated Baxter did not tell her friend where she was going that night and that she seemed in an unusually good mood. Her car was found abandoned in a SmartPark on SW Tenth in downtown Portland the following Monday, the day the investigation into her disappearance formally began. Mitchell Conyers was mentioned frequently in the articles, but he never rose to the level of a person of interest in the investigation. However, The Oregonian did report leaks from within the Portland Police Bureau to the effect that Conyers and Baxter had a “stormy” relationship, and that Conyers had refused a lie detector test.
    Several entries in her appointment book caught my eye. Nicole Baxter was a busy woman who met with lots of people, and on several occasions she met or had a phone conversation with the