“He was about six foot two, perhaps two hundred, two–twenty pounds. She wasn’t five feet tall and weighed maybe ninety pounds. She didn’t have too much of a chance against him. I managed to take this picture with a hidden camera seconds after I’d been shot with fifty thousand volts from a stun gun, right before I was kicked into insensibility.” I held up my right hand, which was in a kind of brace; I’d reinjured the fingers fighting Baladine. “Two of my fingers and five of the small bones in the back of my hand broke as I tried to protect my head.”

I heard another intake of horrified breath but continued with my presentation in a dry, academic voice. It was the only way I could speak without giving way to emotion. I went through the details of Nicola’s daughter’s death, what I’d been told by the women at Coolis about Nicola’s desperate grief and how she’d pounded on the guard’s chest when they laughed at her plea to be allowed to attend the baby’s funeral. I couldn’t look at Mr. Contreras; he was so upset that I knew my own composure would crack. I heard Peppy whining by his side with shared misery.

Morrell put up another slide. This one had a red flashing header reading Speculation! Speculation! We’d decided to use that to separate fact from guesswork. I told them I was guessing that Nicola was dumped on the Chicago streets in the same way I was.

“What takes some of the guesswork out of this is the fact that the guards changed my shirt before they took me out of Coolis. I was concussed, manacled, and running a high fever and not able to defend myself; they tore off my shirt and put on one that wouldn’t show the scorch marks from the stun gun.” I stopped for water, remembering Polsen touching the burned skin on my breasts. “They made a comment about not making the mistake they had before, where they had to change the victim’s shirt in Chicago, so they had clearly done this before. It’s just a guess that Nicola Aguinaldo was the person they’d done it to.

“Now here comes more speculation, and mighty interesting it is. The shirt they put on Aguinaldo had been made by Lucian Frenada. You may remember Mr. Frenada’s name: his dead body was found floating in Lake Michigan right before the Fourth of July. Everyone who isn’t brain–dead knows Frenada was a boyhood friend of Lacey Dowell, because Global has been trumpeting that information on television and in the Herald–Star for two months. They grew up together right here at St. Remigio’s.” I glanced at Murray. He was studying the floor.