“I’d like to speak to some of his workmates,” said Gorrie.

“That can be arranged.” Horace pushed a button on his speakerphone. The woman who had shown Gorrie here reappeared. “Krista will assist you with whatever you need.”

The deceased’s staff members had little information about Mackay, responding to Gorrie’s suggestions that he might have had a randy appetite with shrugs rather than winks. His secretary, however, seemed to have formed a mild attachment. Tora Grant called her boss “charming” and “very able,” but as Gorrie continued with his questions, her answers dribbled down to bare yeses and noes. Finally, the inspector put it to her directly.

“Did you have sex with him?”

Her face turned so red it could have been mistaken for a traffic light.

She started to say something, but quickly stopped. Gorrie waited a bit before gently prompting. “He seemed quite an attractive man.”

“A hug ’n a kiss, a little flirting ’s all we ever did.” She took a hard breath, which made it seem to the inspector that she was lying. “I dina’, but might have, I’ll admit it.”

Her skin color returned to normal with the admission. She looked slightly angry, but gave no hint that she was going to cry, or say anything else. Gorrie waited a moment, then fell back to a few routine questions, circling around.

“Did you know if he had a gun?” he asked.

“Never heard.”

“Was he acting strange in the past week or so?”

“Not so’s I could tell.”

“Meet his wife?”

“Ne’er. Ne’er. Not.”

“Very definitive on that.” Gorrie made a show of folding his notebook away, a well-practiced trick—he was setting up to lob the seemingly casual question on the way out the door. “If anything occurs to you, please call me,” he said, handing over a card.

“Yes.”

He took a step, then canted his head to the side as if inspiration had just beamed in from Scotland Yard. “Anyone else?”

“Else?”

“Do you know of other girlfriends?”

She turned scarlet again. “I—”

The secretary had overheard several conversations, as it turned out, but one woman in particular stood out, Cardha Duff. And she should stand out, Gorrie decided when he saw the department phone records: Mr. Mackay had called her two or three times a day for the past three weeks.

From the time Cardha Duff was a young girl, she had hated drugs of all kinds, even aspirin. And yet now at the age of twenty-six, she needed drugs to survive—to be precise, 150 milligrams of Synthroid every day. Cardha Duff needed to take this drug because her body no longer manufactured thyroid hormones, due to the fact that she no longer had a thyroid.