Perhaps it was the barely perceptible shift of air when the door was silently pulled open wider, or perhaps I simply sensed a presence the way an animal would. I happened to look up to find Ben Stevens standing in the doorway as I sat at his desk screwing the cap back on a bottle of Red cologne. For a long, icy moment, our eyes held and neither of us spoke. I did not feel fear. I did not feel the least bit concerned by what he had caught me doing I felt rage “You’re keeping unusually late hours, Ben.”

Zipping up his toilet kit, I returned it to its drawer. I laced my fingers on top of the blotter, my movements, my speech, deliberate and slow.

“The thing I’ve always liked about working after hours is there is no one else around,” I said. “No distractions. No risk of someone walking in and interrupting whatever it is you are doing. No eyes or ears. Not a sound, except on rare occasion when the security guard happens to wander through. And we all know that doesn’t happen often unless his attention is solicited, because he hates coming into the morgue at any time. I’ve never known a security guard who didn’t hate that. Same goes for the cleaning crew. They won’t even go downstairs, and they do as little up here as they can get away with. But that point is moot, isn’t it? It’s close to nine o’clock. The cleaning crew is always gone by seven-thirty.

“What intrigues me is that I did not guess before now. It never crossed my mind. Maybe that is a sad comment about how preoccupied I’ve been. You told the police you did not know Susan personally, yet you frequently gave her rides to and from work, such as on the snowy morning I autopsied Jennifer Deighton. I remember that man was very distracted on that occasion. She left the body in the middle of the corridor, and she was dialing a number on the phone and quickly hung up when I walked into the autopsy suite. I doubt she was placing a business call at seven-thirty in the morning on a day when most people weren’t going to venture out of their homes because of the weather. And there was no one in the office to call - no one had gotten in yet, except you. If she were dialing your number, why would her impulse be to hide that from me? Unless you were more than her direct supervisor.