“Okay, Harry,” Murphy said. “Where do we get started?”

I felt awkward standing there while she and Butters sat at the table, but it wasn’t like I could pull out a chair. “Um. Maybe we get started with what you know about my… my shooting.”

She nodded and pulled on her cop face—her expression professionally calm, detached, analytical. “We don’t have much, officially speaking,” she said. “I came to pick you up and found the blood and a single bullet hole. There wasn’t quite enough to declare it a murder scene. Because the vic… because you were on the boat and it was in motion, there was no way to extrapolate precisely where the bullet came from. Probably a nearby rooftop. Because the bullet apparently began to tumble as it passed through your body, it left asymmetric holes in the walls of the boat. But forensics thinks it was something between a .223 assaultrifle round and a .338 magnum-rifle round; more likely the latter than the former.”

“I never got into rifles. What does that mean?”

“It means a sniper rifle or a deer rifle,” Butters clarified. “Not necessarily military. There are plenty of civilian weapons that fire rounds in those calibers.”

“We never found the bullet,” Murphy said. She took a deep breath. “Or the body.”

I noticed that both Murph and Butters were staring at me very intently.

“Uh,” I said. “I… sort of did that whole tunnel-of-light thing—which is a crock, by the way.” I bit down on a mention of Murphy’s father. “Um, I was sent back to solve the murder. Which… sort of implies a death. And they said my body wasn’t available, so…”

Murphy looked down and nodded.

“Huh,” Butters said, frowning. “Why send you back?”

I shrugged. “Said what came next wasn’t for whiners or rubberneckers.”

Murphy snorted. “Sounds like something my father would say.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Heh.”

Butters arched an eyebrow. His dark eyes flickered between me and Murphy, and thoughtful lines appeared on his face.

“Anyway,” I said. “That’s what you know officially, right? So… what else do you know?”

“I know it wasn’t Marcone,” Murphy said. “All of his troubleshooters have alibis that check out. So do he and Gard and Hendricks. I know which building the shot probably came from, and it wasn’t an easy one.”

“Four hundred and fifty yards,” Butters said. “Which means it was probably a professional gunman.”

“There are amateurs who can shoot that well,” Murphy said.

“As a rule, they don’t do it from buildings at their fellow Americans,” Butters replied. “Look, if we assume it’s an amateur, it could be anyone. But if we assume it was a professional—which is way more likely, in any case—then it gives us the beginning of an identity, and could lead us back to whomever he works for.”

“Even if we do assume that,” Murphy said, “I don’t have the access to information that I used to. We’d need to review TSA video records, security cameras—all kinds of things I can’t get to anymore.”