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should sort through everything or not before delivering the box to Detective Salyers—after all, if she didn't look, she could always plead ignorance.
    On the other hand, Detective Salyers already believed she had looked.
    She heaved the box to the bed and gingerly lifted the lid, releasing a smoky odor into the room. Her heart squeezed with the thought that, fugitive or no, Gary's life had been reduced to this cardboard box. She sorted through bills and junk mail and set them aside, unopened. A wire tray held more mail, but the envelopes appeared to have been opened, she assumed by Gary. A check of the postmarks confirmed that they were received the week he disappeared. She uncovered his cell-phone bill, and a half dozen credit-card invoices, all with overdue amounts that were breathtaking. Gary was either slothful about bill paying or was deeply in debt.
    There was a cube of yellow note paper, on the top of which he'd scribbled, "extra door key for Gordon." She didn't remember him mentioning anyone named Gordon, but if Gary was giving him a key to his apartment, they must be close. A neighbor? A cleaning service?
    There were various flyers and postcards advertising all kinds of happenings in Buckhead, midtown, and downtown Atlanta. Concerts, art shows, restaurant openings, club events, open houses. It was how he kept up with everything, she presumed. He was on the mailing lists of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Woodruff Arts Center, the High Museum of Art, the Fernbank Museum, the Falcons, the Braves, the Hawks, and every college in the vicinity. She turned over each flyer, looking for highlighting or more hand-scribbled notes. On the back of the postcard for the High Museum, he had written—illegibly—what looked like "hardy manuals." The nonsensical words meant nothing to her.
    There were sales papers, random coupons, and other irrelevant pieces of mail. She almost missed a small envelope the size of a gift card. The envelope was blank, but contained a tiny pink card. Outside it read, "Missing you," and inside it read "Missing me?" The card was signed, not with a signature, but with a lip imprint in pink lipstick. The imprint was smeared, badly...purposefully, but by the sender or by the receiver? Was it a message from his "troubled" ex? Since the envelope had no address or stamp, the sender had obviously delivered it in person, or left it where Gary would find it.
    She returned the card to its envelope, then delved through the rest of the box's contents—a couple of baseball caps, although not the burnt-orange-colored one he wore most often. A couple of sports-themed paperweights, a Swiss Army knife, a handful of matchbooks from local restaurants, some bottles of over-the-counter painkillers, a few music CDs he'd burned and labeled himself—80s ROCK, 90s ROCK, DELTA BLUES. She winced when she thought of his extensive music and movie collection being melted down by the fire.
    At the bottom of the box was a dusty framed photograph of his parents, a Midwestern-looking couple dressed in sensible clothes, smiling as if they were having an appropriate amount of fun. She thought of her own parents and how frantic they would be if they had lived to witness this. A wry smile curved her mouth as she wondered which would consume her mother the most—her proximity to a hideous crime, or utilizing her hard-won college degree to sell shoes.
    There was a small photo album, which surprised her because Gary didn't seem like the sentimental type. The photos in the beginning were dated and yellowed—various shots of him growing up, labeled on the back in a neat, feminine script, and she guessed that Gary's mother had started the album and perhaps he had added to it after her death. The more recent pictures were mostly snapshots of him with various well-dressed people she didn't recognize. The women were numerous, but none of them seemed to have been singled out by the camera. As she turned pages, however, the faces of four men