“Troy Rosado,” Lucy says to Donoghue. “I just want to toss that out there because someone will suggest he could be who Aunt Kay was seeing. Nineteen years old, five-nine, a hundred and forty pounds. He’d disappeared with Carrie, was definitely in Florida, was definitely in the area and probably was complicit in the murder of his own father and on the family yacht when it happened. Then he and Carrie vanished.”

“That’s not who shot me. It wasn’t Troy Rosado,” I reply.

“You would swear to that under oath?” Donoghue asks.

“I’m positive the person I saw wasn’t him.”

“You’d met him before?” Donoghue asks.

“No. But I’d seen photographs and it doesn’t matter because I recognized Carrie. But I wish what I remember is clearer. What I see in my mind now isn’t as distinct as it was at first. The images have been overlaid by what I’ve found out since, and by the trauma.”

“Do you think being shot and its aftermath changed what you remember about your encounter?” Janet asks.

“I don’t know because I’ve never been shot before,” I reply.

“I have,” she says. “When I was just getting started with the Bureau and hadn’t been out of the Academy even a year. One night I walked into a 7-Eleven to buy a soda. I have the cooler door open, figuring out what I want. I bent down to reach for a Diet Dr Pepper when this guy comes in with a gun and proceeds to rob the place. I took care of it but got wounded. Nothing serious. Except later when I saw the security video, the kid in it didn’t look like the one I saw.”

“You’re suggesting that trauma changes your perceived reality,” Donoghue says.

“It did for me. I knew the guy I killed was the one who robbed the store and shot me, but it’s really weird that what I remember I saw and what I really saw weren’t the same thing. I swore his eyes were dark when in fact they were blue. I remembered his skin as light brown with pimples when in fact it was white with peach fuzz. I described a teardrop tattoo on his face and in fact it was a mole. I thought he was in his twenties and it turned out he was thirteen.”

“That had to be hard,” Donoghue says.

“Not really. He might have been a kid but he had a very grown-up Taurus nine mil and two extra magazines in his pocket.”

“Would you have picked him in a lineup?” Donoghue asks.

“Fortunately I didn’t have to since his body was right there on the floor.”

“But would you have?”

“Honestly I don’t know. It depends on who else was in it.”