Nair took her back to the apartment at nine AM.
The body was gone. The scene had been cleared — she had been told what this meant, that the physical evidence had been collected and documented and the space had been released for access, but the cleared scene was not the same as the apartment before. There were marks — the fine powder of fingerprint collection on surfaces, the slight rearrangement of things that had been examined. The bedroom floor had a chalk outline that she did not go into the bedroom to look at directly.
She went to the living room. She sat on the floor again — not the sofa, the floor, the same position she had been in yesterday morning. She put her back against the wall and she looked at the apartment and she thought about the notebook's instruction: the apartment will tell you.
Nair sat in one of the dining chairs and watched her. She had brought two coffees — the specific Coorg filter coffee from a shop near the station, and she had bought the right kind without asking, which meant she had noted the ceramic cup and the coffee maker and had drawn a conclusion. Sharp woman, Nair.
"Tell me what you see," Nair said.
"The bookshelves," she said. "They're not organised by author or title. They're organised by — I was trying to read the system yesterday. I think it's organised by what she was thinking about when she read them. Time-of-life organisation." She stood up and went to the shelves. She ran her hand along the spines. Her hand knew what it was looking for — she could feel the knowledge in her fingers before her eyes confirmed it. She found the section she was looking for: the middle of the third shelf. "These," she said. "Memory and neuroscience. She read all of these." She pulled one out — a book on the science of autobiographical memory, well-worn, margin notes in the same handwriting as the notebook. "She was researching her own project. This is the theoretical foundation."
"Go on," Nair said. She was writing.
