“You told her to go to her room,” I said. “I heard you say that earlier, mutter something about going to your room. Who were you talking to?’

He dropped his eyes. “The child is self. Self feels intensely, cries, cannot control emotions. Sometimes it is best to send self to his room as I just did Hailey. To hold together. A trick I learned. When I was a boy I learned I had to; my father did not react well if I cried.”

“It is all right to cry, Reverend Dawson.”

His eyes filled with tears. I heard Marino’s footsteps on the stairs. Then he strode into the kitchen and Dawson said the phrase again, in anguish, under his breath.

Marino looked at him, baffled. “I think your son’s home,” he said.

Susan’s father began to weep uncontrollably as car doors slammed shut out front in the wintry darkness and laugher sounded from the porch.

Christmas dinner went into the trash, the evening spent pacing about the house and talking on the phone while Lucy stayed inside my study with the door shut. Arrangements had to be made. Susan’s homicide had thrown the office into a state of crisis. Her case would have to be sealed, photographs kept away from those who had known her. The police would have to go through her office and her locker. They would want to interview members of my staff.

“I can’t be down there,” Fielding, my deputy chief, told me over the phone. “I realize that,” I said, a lump forming in my throat. “I neither expect nor want anyone down there.”

,,And you?,, “I have to be.”

“Christ. I can’t believe this has happened. I just can’t believe it.”

Dr. Wright, my deputy chief in Norfolk, kindly agreed to drive to Richmond early the next morning. Because it was Sunday, no one else was in the building except for Vander, who had come to assist with the Luma-Lite. Had I been emotionally capable of doing Susan’s autopsy, I would have refused. The worst thing I could do for her was to jeopardize her case by having the defense question the objectivity and judgment of an expert witness who also happened to be her boss. So I sat at a desk in the morgue while Wright worked. From time to time he commented to me above the clatter of steel instruments and running water as I stared at the cinderblock wall. I did not touch any of her paperwork of label a single test tube. I did not turn around to look.

Once I asked him, “Did you smell anything on her or her clothes? A cologne of some sort?”

He stopped what he was doing and I heard him walk several steps. “Yes. Definitely around the collar of her coat and on the scarf.”

“Does it smell like men’s cologne to you?”