Identify

identify
verb, transitive. To establish or indicate who or what someone or something is. To recognize or distinguish. As "identify someone or something with": to associate someone closely with, or to regard someone as having strong links with. To equate.
verb, intransitive. To regard oneself as sharing the same characteristics or thinking as someone else.

The door creaked softly as Tim pushed it. "Hello? Anyone home?" He remained on the threshold, listening, but no one answered or appeared, so he stepped into the apartment.

As soon as he inhaled, he knew that no one had been there for a long time--weeks, maybe. He stirred dust with every step, and the air was stuffy, as if it hadn't moved lately.

"What a dump," he muttered as he approached what passed for the bed: a mattress on the floor in the far corner, covered with creased, stained sheets and a thin blanket. No one had bothered to spread it up, much less make it. He crouched over it, grimacing at the greasy-looking pillowcases and sniffed. He could barely detect the odor of sweat. So, they had been gone for awhile, but not all that long. Seven-to-ten days, maybe.

A gooseneck lamp with a dusty, sixty-watt bulb sat on a cardboard box next to the head of the bed. Beside it, on the matted brown carpet, was an aluminum pie pan that had been used as an ashtray, brimming with cigarette butts. Tim hunkered down to poke through them. They all seemed to be the same brand--brown paper around the filters--but as he stirred them, he spotted a few that were different: filters covered in white paper and stained with lipstick. He lifted one to take a closer look and immediately identified it: her brand; her shade. He dropped the butt and rose to his feet, turning to look at the galley kitchen and the door to the bathroom. She had been here, all right. Now, he needed to find something that would suggest where she might have gone.

He entertained a brief hope that she and the man she had stayed with in this apartment might have split up when they left, but realized that that probably wasn't the case. She hated being alone. It was one of the reasons she was no longer living with Tim.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.