I sighed heavily. I touched the plastic wrapped around this body. I narrowed my eyes. If he wanted to play, I was up to it.

"Cleona Chatsworth," I moaned, "Come forth!"

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Tolliver ducking his head to hide his smile. Dr. Hatton was growing even paler than he'd been before, almost to the point of matching one of his clients. He gasped. I'd heard the name right. Luckily for me, Cleona Chatsworth wanted someone to know what had happened to her, wanted it very badly.

"Cleona was poisoned," I whispered, my free hand moving in a circle over the corpse. I thought Hatton was going to faint.

"What do I look for?" he croaked.

"Someone gave it to her in salad dressing," I crooned. "The selenium."

I opened my eyes and said, "This lady was poisoned."

Lyle Hatton stared at me with glassy eyes.

"We're going now," I told Tolliver, who was glaring at the doctor, his hands curled into fists.

So we left the room, and we went back down the long hall. The young woman had waited down the hall for us, and as silently as she'd escorted us there, she led us back to the door to the outside. I was profoundly glad to step out into the cold gray day and take a deep breath of air untainted by death. Tolliver and I stood watching the heavy traffic on Madison for maybe five minutes, inhaling and exhaling, happy to be out of the building. The humming had seemed very intense before I'd entered, but it had only been a shadow of what I'd felt when I was actually within the walls.

When I felt more like myself, I said, "It wasn't Diane who killed her. Tabitha was wanting her mother."

He absorbed that. "That's good, then," he said. "One down."

"Don't laugh at me," I said, though his mouth hadn't twitched. "I think at least it's a start."

"Sure," he said. "And I'm not doing any laughing." He gripped my arm so I'd look at him. "I don't know how you do it and stay sane. I really, really admire you."

Now was so not the time for Tolliver to be all real and sympathetic.

"I want them to name the murderer." I began walking across the parking lot to our car. "Usually, I'm more or less accepting of the fact that people murder other people. That's just part of the world, I guess. But I'm really mad about this. I'm really, really angry."

"You've had children before," Tolliver said, meaning that I had read their deaths before.

"Oh, sure, I've done children. But this is different. I don't know why. Maybe it's the family, still waiting to find out what happened to her, figuring it's one of them who did it. This has just gotten to me."

"That's not good. It's tearing you up. I don't want this to happen to you."