Slowly the room emptied. When it did, Marta closed the door and the room fell quiet. Through the frosted glass in the door, I could see the silhouettes of cops milling around in the hall, walking back and forth. Their voices were muted; the noise of their activity reduced to a low murmur. I sat behind my desk, relieved at last to be off my feet.

There were two client chairs facing my desk. Marta took one, her partner the other. Reingold, she’d said. I didn’t know him. He was white, slightly balding, a strawberry birthmark on his right cheek. There was no wedding ring on his finger, and he exhibited no outward signs of having a welcoming personality. His beady eyes stayed pinned to mine. No smile.

I leaned forward. “Are we really doing this?”

Reingold and Marta exchanged a look, but the almost imperceptible communication from partner to partner was lost to me. Each team had their own language, their own shortcuts. All I could do was wait until they hashed it out and got back to me. I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes for a second.

“We’re going to go over it again,” Marta finally said. “We’ll stop you when we’ve heard enough.” Her notebook was at the ready, so was Reingold’s.

I opened my top drawer and took out a bottle of aspirin, held it up. “Anybody else need one of these?”

Neither cop responded.

I slid two tablets from the bottle, swallowed them dry, and then set the bottle front and center. “Well, if you change your mind, here they are.”

“You got security cameras in this dump? Do we have any shot of getting a look at who dropped that box off?”

“No, and no, and I take exception to the ‘dump’ crack.” It was a dump, but I could say so, they couldn’t.

Reingold cocked a thumb toward the hall. “How about Easy Rider out there? Looks like he could be into something.”

I stared at him, unamused. “Dead end. Turk’s solid. You’ll have to try harder than that.”

Marta let out a low, frustrated growl. “Slide me that aspirin, dammit.”

For more than two hours, I answered the same questions at least five times. No, I didn’t know who might have wanted Darby dead. Yes, I did know the deceased. No, not intimately. Yes, of course, I had access to a box. Who couldn’t get their hands on a box, if they needed one?

Marta and Reingold tried angling for more information and even tried slyly steering me toward revealing details of my investigation—with no success. It was a soul-draining, relentless back-and-forth that quickly began to take on the rhythm of a go-for-broke tennis match, neither side willing or able to give up a single point. The aspirin had a tough time keeping up.