As she dissolved into sobs, Gorrie phased her out, thinking there wasn’t much more of relevance to be gotten from her. Hearsay aside, Christine Gibbons’s account could be trimmed to a paragraph. She’d come to her friend’s bungalow this morning in her automobile, the two of them having planned to strap the tyke into a carriage and go shopping down by the Ness. Because Mr. Mackay would occasionally take a ride to the plant with one of the other site-workers, it did not strike Christine as unusual to find his car in the drive. At any rate, she’d knocked on the door and got no answer. Knocked some more, no answer. Then she’d rung the bell. Still no one came to the door. All the while she could hear the child crying inside the house, which caused her some growing disturbance. After another ten minutes of knocking and bell-ringing, Christine let herself in with a spare key Claire had given her to use in a pinch, and called out from the entry hall, again without response. With her opinion of Mr. Mackay being what it was, and no sign of Claire, and the baby shrieking its lungs out, Christine’s concern led her toward the nursery, at which point she passed the open bedroom door, was confronted with the sight of the two dead bodies, and rushed to phone the police, something she could not afterward recall having done in her trauma.

The rest was distraught babble, and a free-flowing tirade of slurs and accusations against the deceased Mr. Mackay.

Now Gorrie clicked the tip back into his pen and glanced out the bedside window. A newly arrived trio of official vehicles had joined the line of police cars that had preceded them into the front drive. A patrol cruiser led the pack. It was followed by a forensics van, and an ambulance. None of them had its flasher or siren on. The damage was done, they were in no hurry, why stir up the entire neighborhood?

Gorrie watched the patrol car’s driver and passenger doors swing open to break the horizontal orange stripes painted across both sides. Watched Robertson and a female social worker exit the car and start toward the house. Then he shifted his eyes to the ambulance at the rear, and watched the emergency medical technicians leave their vehicle for what was no longer an emergency at all, but rather a nasty cleanup job.