“Well I’m just not seeing it.” Harold is looking at the bloody matted hair, walking his gloved fingers through it. “I saw something and now I don’t.”

“I’ll look carefully again later. I didn’t notice anything like glass in her hair,” I reply.

“But wouldn’t you think there might be?” Harold stares up at the light fixture in the ceiling, at the empty sockets where two lightbulbs had been screwed in.

He looks around at the broken glass all over the floor, and then he acts out an imagined scenario at the same instant Carrie is acting out her drama on the video. Harold demonstrates someone changing lightbulbs and suddenly falling backward off the ladder.

“If she had lightbulbs, the chandelier’s glass dome in her hands and they hit the floor at the same time she did it would be like a glass bomb going off. Wouldn’t you expect glass all over her?” he asks as Carrie stares in the mirror over the bathroom sink and gives a big smile to her own reflection, then musses up her very short white-gold hair.

“Just cover her really well and she goes straight into the cooler, and I’ll deal with her,” I repeat my instructions.

I can’t pause the video. It’s as if Carrie has hijacked my phone at the worst possible time, in the middle of a suspicious death scene that should require my full attention.

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

THE ONLY WAY I COULD STOP THE RECORDING IS TO power down my phone and turn it off. I’m not about to do that and it vaguely occurs to me that what’s happening could come back to haunt me. If the police complain that I was on my phone, that I was watching a movie, texting or who knows what? It would be very bad.

“Off to one side of the only door that led in and out of Lucy’s room is a private bath.” Carrie sweeps her hand around it as if she’s Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, and Rusty shakes open plastic bags and begins covering Chanel Gilbert’s bare feet.

“And the new agents in training didn’t enjoy similar luxury.” Carrie glances down at the script, then back into a hidden camera, and she does this repeatedly. “All of them had roommates. They shared toilets, vanities and showers at the far end of the hall. But young precocious Lucy didn’t mingle with any of those lesser females, all of them older, some with law degrees and Ph.D.s. One was an ordained Presbyterian minister. Another was a former beauty queen.