Claudia Flannery arranged herself in the chair in the interrogation room at Crimson Lake police station and sighed, watery eyes wandering disdainfully over every scuff mark and stain on the bare white walls. It was a mystery to Sweeney why the room seemed to inspire such disgust in the bejeweled old crone. She remembered the sour smell of burning oil and human sweat hanging in the air of the cellar beneath the Barking Frog, the occasional unmistakable whiff of Vaseline. She could only imagine what that smelled like when the lights were up, what stains and marks the candlelit darkness hid.

Amanda took a long while finishing up an explosion of friendly chatter with Sweeney’s chief outside the interrogation room door. The friendliness seemed distinctly one-sided. Chief Superintendent Damien Clark had indeed been around when Amanda had committed her murder, and had made it clear to Sweeney that he wanted the bubbly investigator out of the station as soon as possible. Sweeney had assumed that, when Chief Clark discovered she had been working with the private investigator, she would be yanked into his office and given a roasting, and that the lean old man would have insisted Amanda be removed from the investigation altogether. But it wasn’t so. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps the hard-faced, softly spoken man knew that Sweeney felt lonely and intimidated in her role as the station’s only detective-rank inspector. Like a father who tolerates his child’s bad friend, he’d staved off Amanda’s blathering with minimal civility, huffed off to his office, and slammed the glass door, leaving the two to interview the bar owner together.

Amanda watched the preparations of the recording for the interview like a fascinated child. When Sweeney identified herself as Detective Inspector, Amanda gave her a little congratulatory bump in the shoulder with her own, obliterating any air of officialdom Sweeney had managed to gather in the room until that point. Sweeney set her pen to her interview sheet and wrote Claudia Flannery’s name at the top of the page.

“Ms. Flannery,” Sweeney said, “I’m obliged to inform you that we intend to pursue a range of charges against you arising from what Ms. Pharrell and I witnessed last night.”

Claudia yawned.

“The first charge,” Sweeney insisted, her voice hardening, “will be lying to the police. You told us your establishment, the Barking Frog, would be closed yesterday evening. That was not the truth. And you failed to mention the sizeable basement connected to your establishment, thereby preventing our forensics officers from including it in their processing of the crime scene.”

“No one asked me about the basement.” Claudia rolled her eyes. “Perhaps if you’d wanted to search it, you could have told me it was considered part of the crime scene.”

“We never knew it was there!” Sweeney said.

“Then it looks like someone should have checked the building plans to ensure they covered all of the establishment,” Claudia sneered. “Who exactly is in charge of this investigation?”