I’m sorry, I wish I could say to her as I scan puddles of blood that are a viscous dark red and drying black around the edges. Something urgent has come up. I have to leave but I’ll be back, I’d tell her if I could, and I’m vaguely aware of how loud the flies have gotten inside the foyer. With doors opening and shutting as cops come in and out of the house, flies have invaded, shimmering like drops of gasoline, alighting and crawling, looking for wounds and other orifices to lay their eggs.

My attention snaps back to the display of my phone. The image is the same. Lucy’s empty dorm room as seconds tick by. Two hundred and eighty-nine. Three hundred and ten. Now almost six minutes and there must be something coming. Who sent this to me? Not my niece. There would be no reason on earth. And why would she do it now? Why after so many years? I have a feeling I know the answer. I don’t want it to be true.

Dear God don’t let me be right. But I am. I’d have to be in total denial not to put two and two together.

“They have vegetarian sandwiches if that’s your thing,” one of the cops is saying to me.

“No thanks.” I keep waiting as I watch, and then I sense something else.

Hyde is pointing his phone at me. He’s taking a photograph.

“You’re not going to do something with that,” I say without looking up.

“I thought I’d tweet it after I Facebook it and post it on Instagram. Just kidding. You checking out a movie on your phone?”

I glance up long enough to catch him staring at me. He has that glint in his eyes, the same mischievous gleam he gets when he’s about to spitball another lamebrain quip.

“I don’t blame you for entertaining yourself,” he says. “It’s kinda dead in here.”

“I can’t do that. I’m too old-school,” the trooper says. “I need a decent size screen if I’m watching a movie.”

“My wife reads books on her phone.”

“Me too. But only when I’m driving.”

“Ha-ha. You’re a real comedian, Hyde.”

“Do you think it’s worth stringing in here? Hey Doc?”

I realize another Cambridge cop has appeared. He starts in about how to handle the blood evidence. I don’t know his name. Thinning gray hair, a mustache, short and squat, what they call a fireplug build. He doesn’t work for investigations but I’ve seen him on the Ivy League streets of Cambridge pulling people, writing tickets. One more nonessential who shouldn’t be here but it’s not for me to order cops off the scene. The body and any associated biological evidence are my jurisdiction but nothing else is. Technically.