The FBI had sent Lyle Torgeson again, but the feds had beefed up their presence with someone from Homeland Security. The city had sent only the woman from the Office of Emergency Management instead of the duo who’d come to my hospital room. The CPD sent the same two guys from the Bomb and Arson squad, a young white man with a crew cut who was already developing a paunch and a Latino about my own age who was balding and had big fatigue circles around his eyes.

“I don’t have Dr. Herschel’s permission to bring all these strangers into her home,” I told the doorman. “Is there a conference room we could use?”

“There’s a room in the building manager’s office,” the doorman said doubtfully. “It’s kind of small, though.”

“We can take you down to Thirty-fifth and Michigan,” the Latino Bomb and Arson guy suggested.

“You have a warrant? … Then we’ll meet here. There are only six of us, after all.”

The doorman called up to the building manager to see if the room was free and to send someone down to escort us so that he wouldn’t have to abandon his post at the entrance.

It was a small room, and getting six chairs around the round table meant we all had to be careful to keep our knees to ourselves. I was sorry in a way that I’d kept them out of Lotty’s place, but if they were uncomfortable inhaling one another’s bad breath, which the woman from OEM had to a remarkable degree, they wouldn’t stay long.

I kept my big plastic glasses on mostly to annoy them. They would want to try to read my facial tics, how I moved my eyes and so on, and now they couldn’t.

“You look like the bad end of a catfight,” Torgeson said. “You get your hair caught in a wringer over at the nun’s place when you went back there?”

“Everyone’s taping this, right? So the FBI and OEM and CPD are all going to get the same useful transcript. The real question here is”—I paused long enough to see that they were all leaning forward, hoping for some gem of self-revelation—“why is a woman always characterized as being in a catfight after an altercation? I’m sure with the research you’ve done on me, you know I have two dogs, so it’s a good bet I’d be more responsive to a dogfight metaphor. And yet your underlying sexism made you—”

“Enough,” Torgeson barked. “You know damned well what I was talking about.”

I shook my head. “Mind reading isn’t one of my skills. And I haven’t been tapping your phone, so I can’t rely on your conversations to tell me what you’re thinking or talking about.”