"I remember a few things now," she said. "Fragments. The rosemary brought something — a morning somewhere with hills. And there was something last night — I woke up twice before the morning, before I was fully awake. I have — I have the feeling of a door. A front door. Someone at the door. Someone I let in." She paused. "I let someone in last night. I knew them. I opened the door."
"Layla Menon," Nair said.
"I think so," she said. "The phone under the sofa."
"The phone is showing us her last location," Nair said. "She was in this apartment as of—" She checked her notes. "Her phone last connected to the building's WiFi at eleven-fifty PM, two nights ago. The connection terminated at one-seventeen AM." She paused. "She did not take her phone when she left."
"Because she was not planning to leave," she said. "If she planned to leave — if this was a plan with an exit — she would have taken her phone." She looked at Nair steadily. "The woman on the floor. Have you identified her?"
"The national database returned a match this morning," Nair said. She paused with the pause of someone preparing to say something. "The second set of fingerprints — the unidentified set, the ones on all the regular-use surfaces — the database matched them to a woman named Layla Menon. The same person the phone is registered to."
The room was very quiet.
"The woman on the floor was Layla Menon," she said. Not a question. The shape of it had been forming since yesterday and now it was the shape.
