“When she rented this unit, the one thing she insisted on was a reliable power outlet,” said Dottie, her face averted to avoid seeing the occupant of the freezer. “Said she couldn’t afford to have the electricity cut out on her. Now I know why.”

“Do you know anything else about Ms. Baumeister?” asked Jane.

“Just what I already told Detective Frost here. Paid on time, and her checks were always good. My renters, they’re mostly just in and out, don’t necessarily want to chat much. A lot of them have sad stories. They lose their homes, and this is where their stuff ends up. Hardly ever anything worth auctioning off. Most of the time it’s like this.” She waved at the tired furniture stacked up against the walls. “Valuable only to the people who own it.”

Jane slowly scanned the objects that Betty Ann Baumeister had felt were worth storing these past eleven years. At $250 a month, it would have cost her $3,000 a year, and over a decade that was $30,000 just to hold on to these possessions. There was enough here to furnish a four-bedroom house, though not in style. The dressers and bookshelves were made of warped particleboard. The yellowed lamp shades looked fragile enough to disintegrate at a touch. Worthless junk, to Jane’s eye. But when Betty Ann looked at the frayed couch and the wobbly chairs, did she see treasures or trash?

And which category was the man in the freezer?

“Do you think she killed him?” asked Dottie Dugan.

Jane looked at her. “I don’t know, ma’am. We don’t even know who he is. We’ll have to wait and see what the medical examiner says.”

“If she didn’t kill him, why did she stuff him in the freezer?”

“You’d be surprised what people do.” Jane closed the freezer lid, glad to shut off her view of the frozen face, the ice-encrusted lashes. “Maybe she just didn’t want to lose him.”

“I guess you detectives see a lot of weird stuff.”

“More than I care to think about.” Jane sighed, exhaling steam. She did not look forward to combing for evidence in this miserably cold locker. At least time was not their enemy; neither the evidence nor the suspect was at risk of slipping away from them.

Her cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” she said, moving a few paces away to answer it. “Detective Rizzoli.”

“I’m sorry to bother you this late at night,” said Father Daniel Brophy. “I just spoke to your husband, and he said you were working a scene.”

She was not surprised to be hearing from Brophy. As the clergyman assigned to Boston PD, he was often called to crime scenes, to minister to the grieving. “We’re okay here, Daniel,” she said. “There don’t seem to be any family members who’ll need any counseling.”

“I’m calling about Maura, actually.” He paused. It was a subject he no doubt found difficult to broach, and no wonder. His affair with Maura was hardly a secret to Jane, and he had to know that she disapproved of it, even if she’d never said so to his face.

“She hasn’t been answering her cell phone,” he said. “I’m concerned.”

“Maybe she’s just not taking calls.” Your calls was what she thought.

“I’ve left half a dozen voice mails. I just wondered if you’ve been able to reach her.”

“I haven’t tried.”

“I want to be sure she’s all right.”

“She’s attending a conference, isn’t she? Maybe she turned off her phone.”

“So you don’t know where she is.”

“I thought it was somewhere out in Wyoming.”

“Yes, I know where she’s supposed to be.”

“Have you tried calling her hotel?”

“That’s just it. She checked out this morning.”

Jane turned as the storage unit door opened again and the medical examiner ducked inside. “I’m kind of busy at the moment,” she said to Brophy.

“She wasn’t supposed to check out until tomorrow.”

“So she changed her mind. She made other plans.”

“She didn’t tell me. What worries me is that I can’t reach her.”

Jane waved at the ME, who squeezed through the mountains of furniture and joined Frost at the freezer. Impatient to get back to work, she said bluntly: “Maybe she doesn’t want to be reached. Have you considered the possibility that she might need time alone?”

He was silent.

It had been a cruel question, and she was sorry she’d asked it. “You do know,” she said more gently, “it’s been hard for her this year.”

“I know.”

“You hold all the cards, Daniel. It’s all about your decision, your choice.”

“Do you think that makes it easier for me, knowing that I’m the one who has to choose?”

She heard his pain and thought: Why do people do this to themselves? How do two intelligent and decent human beings trap themselves in such misery? She’d predicted months ago that it would come to this, that after the hormones faded and the luster was off their shiny new affair, they’d be left with regret as their bitter companion.

“I just want to be sure she’s all right,” he said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if I wasn’t worried.”

“I don’t keep track of her whereabouts.”

“But could you check on her for me?”

“How?”

“Call her. Maybe you’re right, maybe she’s just screening my calls. Our last conversation wasn’t…” He paused. “It could have ended on a better note.”

“You argued?”

“No. But I disappointed her. I know that.”

“That could make her not return your calls.”

“Still, it’s not like her to be unreachable.”

On that point he was right. Maura was too conscientious to be out of touch for long. “I’ll give her a call,” Jane said, and hung up, grateful that her own life was so settled. No tears, no drama, no crazy highs and lows. Just the happy assurance that at that moment, her husband and daughter were at home waiting for her. All around her, it seemed, romantic turmoil was destroying people’s lives. Her father had left her mother for another woman. Barry Frost’s marriage had recently collapsed. No one was behaving the way they used to, the way they should. As she dialed Maura’s cell phone, she wondered: Am I the only one around here who’s still sane?

It rang four times, then she heard the recording: “This is Dr. Isles. I’m not available right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll return your call as soon as possible.”

“Hey, Doc, we’re wondering where you are,” said Jane. “Give me a call, okay?” She disconnected and stared down at her cell phone, thinking of all the reasons why Maura hadn’t answered. Out of range. Dead battery. Or maybe she was having too good a time in Wyoming, away from Daniel Brophy. Away from her job, with all the reminders of death and decay.

“Everything okay?” Frost called out.

Jane slipped the phone in her pocket and looked at him. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED HERE?” SAID ELAINE, HER VOICE faintly slurred from drinking too much whiskey. “Where did this family go?”

They sat huddled around the fireplace, swaddled in blankets that they’d pulled from the cold upstairs bedrooms, the remains of their dinner littering the floor around them. They’d eaten canned pork and beans and macaroni and cheese, saltine crackers and peanut butter. A high-sodium feast, washed down with a bottle of cheap whiskey, which they’d found stashed at the very back of the pantry, hidden behind the sacks of flour and sugar.

It had to be her whiskey, Maura thought, remembering the woman in the photograph with the dull eyes and the blank expression. The pantry was where a woman would hoard a secret supply of liquor, a place where her husband would never bother to explore, not if he considered cooking to be a woman’s job. Maura took a sip, and as the whiskey burned its way down her throat, she wondered what would drive a woman to secret drinking, what misery would make her seek liquor’s numbing solace.

“Okay,” said Arlo. “I can come up with one logical explanation for where these people went.”