I look up at the trees. Their heavy green branches are motionless in stifling air that would be a clamorous symphony if odors were musical instruments in an orchestra of stench. I’d be hearing minor keys, sharps and flats, a crescendoing chaos swelling with percussion. Heavy with bass strings. Building to a suffocating coda.

Then the house would go dark after the encore of death, and the bloated teeming crowd would be too turgid and foul for me to force my way through anymore. Looking for an exit. Not finding one. There isn’t one. Briggs would be the first to say it. I can’t show up at the morgue in Baltimore for him.

It would only give the bad guys something to dig up that doesn’t need to see the light of day, Kay.

I can hear him as if he’s standing in front of me with his deep dimples and big smile. There’s really only one rule in life, he preached. To do what’s right. But he didn’t always, and I wipe my eyes on the backs of my hands.

CHAPTER 33

I REST QUIETLY ON TOP of my hard black boxy perch. I keep my back straight, breathing slowly, deeply, trying not to slouch.

I bought the heavy-duty plastic scene case on sale at Home Depot years ago, and it’s an appropriate throne for the Queen of Crime, for Her Travesty and Royal Hardship. Bryce is quite the pun meister. He calls me a lot of things when he thinks I can’t hear him.

I wait for my molecules to gather, for the dizziness to pass. My brain seems to slide around heavily, slowly, inside my skull like an egg yolk as I turn my throbbing head this way and that. I listen to Marino and Benton. Sipping water, I look closely at who’s talking. Back and forth like a Ping-Pong match. Point and counterpoint like a Gregorian chant. The Pugilistic Crank versus the Unflappable Stoic.

I have a ringside seat as Marino questions, and Benton deflects and evades, not answering anything important about what’s happened to our mutual friend John Briggs. But it’s not lost on me that my husband doesn’t hesitate to probe about the dead woman in our midst, a twenty-three-year-old Canadian who shouldn’t be on the FBI’s radar, certainly not yet.