Before calling the hospital I looked inside my phone to see if the folks who broke in had planted a bug in it. When I didn’t find anything unusual in the mess of wires, I went out behind the warehouse to inspect the phone junction box. There I found that the wires had been stripped and clipped to a secondary set of cables, presumably leading to a listening station. I tapped on them thoughtfully. Probably best that I left them in place. It wasn’t a sophisticated system, but if I dismantled it, Baladine would get something less primitive, harder to find, and harder to circumvent.

Back inside, I let Andras Schiff play Bach on my office CD. I don’t know if those old spy movies are right, that radios block listening devices, but the Goldberg Variations might at a minimum educate the thugs—who knows? I sat next to the speaker with my cell phone and called the hospital. The woman from the agency stared at me curiously, then turned a huffy shoulder: she thought I was trying to keep her from listening to me.

Max Loewenthal’s secretary, Cynthia Dowling, came on the line with her usual efficient friendliness.

“I can’t remember the ER surgeon’s name,” I said. “I should, since it’s Polish, but all I remember is that it had a hundred zees and cees in it.”

“Dr. Szymczyk,” she supplied.

When I explained what I wanted, she put me on hold and tracked down the report. Of course Dr. Szymczyk hadn’t done an autopsy, but he had dictated information while he was working on Aguinaldo. He had described necrotic skin on the abdomen but hadn’t mentioned any serious burn wounds. He had noted a couple of raw spots above the breasts that didn’t seem connected to the blow that killed her.

Raw spots. Those could conceivably have been caused by a stun gun, so maybe Veronica Fassler hadn’t been spinning a complete lie. I would bring fifty dollars for her with me to the prison in the morning.

I worked desultorily with the woman from the agency, but it was hard for me to focus on files. For some people, putting papers in order is a wonderfully soothing act, but I could make so little sense of the world around me that I couldn’t make sense of my scattered papers either.