Cate and the detective are the only people in a large room crammed with rolling chairs and beat-up desks, one of which is buried beneath the ruins of an office Christmas party—a desiccated Yule log cake; a crumbling tower of unspooling lunch-meat wraps; a large, clear plastic bowl nearly drained of punch. This room is an opposite of the office in CSI: Miami; the only colors are bad ones—tan and wheat and beige and off-white and gray, and a dirty pale yellow. An atmosphere of failure in keeping up with the bad behavior of humans. The detective sees her looking at the cake.

“Yeah, happy holidays, right? The truth is there’s always a surge in bag-snatching, small-time burglaries, muggings just before Christmas. People want to get presents even though they can’t afford them. I think they also resent the gap between themselves and people who can afford gifts and turkeys and trees to decorate. They start thinking about evening up that score.” He shifts around in the chair and groans a little through clamped jaws. “Crappy back,” he says. Three red-light buttons on his desk phone are blinking; every once in a while, he looks at these, but doesn’t press anything, or pick up the receiver. It occurs to Cate that landlines are no longer conveyances of important information.

“I’m not sure I can be of much help. A lot of what happened is kind of static in my head.”

“So when you go through something like this, your mind can wall off the mess for a while. I mean, you did a lot of damage in that kitchen, considering that the fire extinguisher was your only weapon. You hit them hard and fast. Were you in the military at some point?” He nods toward her partial hand. Cate sees that the cop is imagining her to be a very different person. The kind of person for whom danger and violence are routine.

“No. Childhood accident.” She rubs the two knobs of bone where fingers used to be. Even her memory of them as full fingers is lost by now. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been in any sort of violent situation before, unless you count a table saw.

“Is he dead?” she asks. The last she saw of him, he was being wheeled out of Neale’s kitchen on a gurney, little oxygen pods stuck up his nostrils. “Did I kill him?”