Jack cleared his throat to give himself a chance to think. His quick assessment was that Farrell was inappropriately defensive. As if to underline this impression, Farrell quickly added, “We didn’t give her anything, if that’s what you are implying. She wasn’t even drinking.”

“I wasn’t implying anything,” Jack said. He congratulated himself for taking a wide sampling of body fluids for toxicology despite the positive finding of bilateral vertebral artery dissection. He now wondered if she’d suffered a peculiar fall that could have sharply twisted, flexed, or extended her neck.

“How many of you brought her to the ER?”

“Three of us.”

Jack nodded.

“You guys were drinking but she wasn’t?”

“I think I want to talk to my lawyer before I answer any more questions,” Farrell said.

Jack pressed on. “How big was your group?”

“There were about a dozen of us, men and women. We went to this dive bar in the West Village. Can you just tell me what she died from?”

“We’re working on that. Did you witness the change in her behavior?”

“Yeah, one minute she was lively and talking, drinking a Coke, the next minute she was slurring her words and didn’t know where or who she was. Then she stood up, staggered a few steps, and fell. I literally caught her, which is why I ended up bringing her to the ER.”

“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?”

“We thought she was drunk, to tell you the truth. I didn’t learn until later that she was a teetotaler.”

In his imagination, Jack could picture the lining of Keara’s vertebral arteries balloon up and gradually choke off the blood supply to her brain. “Can you get me the names and phone numbers of the other people who made up this group?”

“I don’t know, man.” Farrell shied. “I don’t know if I want to get any more involved in all this than I already am.”

“Look, I’m not accusing anyone of any wrongdoing and I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to speak for the dead, which is what medical examiners do. I want Keara to tell us what killed her to try to save someone else from the same fate. There is some key piece of missing information involved here. Tell me, did you talk to her directly during the evening?”

“For a few minutes, but not any more than I talked to everyone else. I mean, like, she was a looker, so all the guys talked to her.”

“Did she mention anything at all about being in an auto accident in the last week or so?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“How about any falls she might have experienced: maybe even earlier last evening, like in the ladies’ room.” Jack didn’t think a fall was a likely culprit with no external evidence of injury, but he didn’t want to rule anything out.

“She didn’t mention it, no.”

Jack finally got the man to agree to make up a list of the other revelers from the previous night, along with their phone numbers. Farrell even promised to have it available by late afternoon.