“Mildred, for once, you let me speak for myself. Don’t go interpreting me to my own husband, for heaven’s sake. We’ve all heard the tape that Ms. Warshawski played; I think we can agree it’s a sad chapter in our family life, but we are a family, we are strong, we will move past this. Linus has kept it out of the papers, bless him”—she directed a grateful look at the corporate counsel, sitting in one of the side chairs—“and I’m sure he’ll help us work out an arrangement with Ms. Warshawski here.”

I leaned back in my armchair. I was still tired, still sore around the arm sockets from having my arms lashed behind me for two hours. I had a couple of broken ribs, and my body still looked like a field of ripe eggplants, but I felt wonderful—clean, newborn, that euphoric sense you get when you know you’re truly alive.

By the time Lotty came on the little recording pen, its battery was dead. She wouldn’t let me leave her place to get a charger, but when I explained why I was so desperate to listen to it she relented enough to let Amy Blount bring my laptop over. When I hooked it up to my iBook, it sprang obediently to life and spilled its digital guts for me.

Thursday night at the warehouse, there had actually still been enough juice in it that it had recorded William, Grobian, and Jacqui. Grobian’s shot at me echoed horrifyingly through Lotty’s living room, followed by a satisfied exclamation from William that I hadn’t heard at the time. The pen had died on the way from the landfill to the hospital; it only gave me part of Grobian’s and William’s quarrel, but I got enough of Grobian’s highly colored language that I could really grow my vocabulary if I replayed it a few times.

After we downloaded it to my Mac, I asked Amy to make about thirty copies: I wanted to ensure they were spread far and wide, so that even the best efforts of Linus Rankin, or the Carnifice detectives, couldn’t eliminate them all. I sent a bunch to my own lawyer, Freeman Carter, put some in my office safe, sent one to Conrad and another to a senior police officer who was a friend of my dad’s, and, after debating it up and down with Amy and Morrell, finally sent one to Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star. Murray was madly trying to persuade his bosses to let him go up against the Bysen money and power; whether they’d ever let him dig into the story was still up in the air.