I press a button, and the blinds on the other side of the glass rise.

“Goddamn it,” Frank says almost at once as he sees Sophie on a steel gurney, lightly covered by a sheet. “Goddamn him. He really killed my little girl. That son of a bitch!”

Helen doesn’t say anything. She stands there statuelike while her husband rants. Her hands have turned into crab claws, and the tissue she’s been holding is now wadded into a near-perfect sphere.

I ask the question for which I know the answer—a question that was already answered by Adam at the crime scene.

“Is this Sophie?”

Frank swings around. “Goddamn it,” he says. “You idiot! Of course it is!”

“Frank, please,” Helen finally mutters. Her words are sucked right into his gaping mouth along with all the air in the saddest room ever built. It passes through my mind that the interior decorator and the contractor had worked together to try to make the space as calming as possible. A soothing palette of blues and light grays playing over a base of soft white. An abstract painting of clouds hangs over a sofa that I imagine is stained with a zillion tears.

Frank ignores his wife and jabs a finger at me. “You goddamn have to arrest Adam Warner for this! He’s the killer! We know it. You know it. Now get on with it, or I swear I’ll make you wish that you had.”

I breathe in his threat. I could make something of it if I was unsure of my skills as an investigator and if I was bereft of compassion for the father of the dead woman on the gurney.

Instead, I press the button, and the blinds fall downward. I open the door and indicate to the Flynns that they should exit.

“Aubrey’s this way,” I say.

Helen doesn’t look at me. She walks by, her head down. I can feel the heat of Frank’s stoplight head as he passes.

“You better keep us informed,” he spits out.

“I’ll tell you everything that I can,” I say. “But just to be as clear as I can—just to be as clear as you’ve been just now—there will be things that I cannot comment about, because I want the killer who did this to be convicted and put away for a very long time.”

“You mean you’ll keep us in the dark?” Frank asks. “That’s just dandy.”

“I want the same thing you want,” I say.

He puffs up his considerably puffed-up body. “Then arrest my son-in-law and be done with all of this.”

“We don’t know what happened, Mr. Flynn,” I say. “But we will.”

I don’t tell him that I know for sure that Adam Warner couldn’t have done it. It isn’t because the evidence—what the eyewitness says he saw—doesn’t point to him at all. It’s because I know him. I know his character. He isn’t the type of guy to hurt anyone. He is good. After all, he saved me.