“The families, the children …” Again she stopped for a second or two, evidently overcome by some image that her own speech was evoking. She slid her chair back from the table, stood, and walked around the table to the French doors that looked out over the patio, the garden, the pasture, and the forest beyond.

“It’s sort of silly, I can’t explain it,” she said, speaking with her back to them, “but I find it easier to talk about this standing up.” She cleared her throat twice before beginning in a barely audible voice. “I believe that murder changes everything forever. It steals something that can never be replaced. It has consequences that go way beyond what happens to the victim. The victim loses his life, which is a terrible thing, an unfair thing, but for him it’s over, the end. He’s lost everything that might have been, but he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t go on feeling the loss, imagining what might have been.” She raised her hands and placed her palms against the glass panes in front of her, a gesture that conveyed both great feeling and great effort at control.

She went on, a little louder. “It’s not the victim who wakes up to a half-empty bed, a half-empty house. He isn’t the one who dreams that he’s still alive, only to wake up to the pain of realizing that he’s not. He doesn’t feel the sickening rage, the heartache his death causes. He doesn’t keep seeing the empty chair at the table, hearing sounds that sound like his voice. He doesn’t keep seeing the closet full of his clothes …” Her voice was growing hoarse. She cleared her throat. “He doesn’t feel the agony—the agony of having the heart of your life torn out.”

She leaned against the glass for several long seconds, then pushed herself slowly away from it. When she turned around toward the table, her face was streaked with tears. “You know about phantom pain? The amputation phenomenon? Feeling pain in the place where your arm or your leg used to be? That’s how murder is for the family left behind. Like the aching in a phantom limb—an unbearable pain in an empty place.”

She stood perfectly still for a little while, staring at some inner landscape. Then she wiped her face roughly with her hands, emerging from behind them with a matter-of-fact determination in her eyes and voice. “To understand what murder really is, you have to talk to the families. That’s my theory, that’s my project, that’s my plan. And that’s what Rudy Getz is excited about.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “If it’s not too much trouble, could I have another cup of coffee?”

“I think we can manage that.” Madeleine smiled pleasantly, went to the sink island, and refilled the coffeemaker.