“There is nothing to thank me for, Mr. Lott,” I reply, as I think of his helicopter filming me. “I’m a public servant doing my job.”

“Without prejudice,” he says. “You did it without preconception or prejudice. You simply stated what was true, and you didn’t have to.”

“It’s not my job to take sides or have an opinion unless it’s about why someone has died.”

“That’s not my wife,” he says, and Peggy Stanton’s identity hasn’t yet been released. “When they played the TV footage in court, I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it instantly, and I wanted to tell you myself in the event there’s been a question.”

I wonder if Toby leaked the identity to Jill Donoghue and if she knows her client is here.

“As grim as the condition of the body seemed to be, I could tell without hesitation it’s not Millie.” Lott removes the cap from a bottle of water. “She couldn’t possibly look like that, and if you’ve been through her medical records or been given details of her physical description, you’ll realize what I’m saying is correct.”

I have little doubt he knows I’ve been through those records and am aware that Mildred Lott is or was almost six feet tall. Peggy Stanton, whose murder Channing Lott shouldn’t know about unless he had something to do with it or his lawyer’s been told, was barely five-foot-three. When she was visible on TV as I was getting her body into the Stokes basket, it was obvious she wasn’t tall. I know from examining her that her hair was white, not dyed blond, and that she had no scars from recent cosmetic surgeries, an abdominoplasty, a rhytidectomy.

“It was the first thing all of us thought when it hit the news.” Al Galbraith reaches for his coffee, and he seems disquieted, as if the subject is a distasteful one. “No matter the condition, someone doesn’t get shorter,” he says awkwardly, as if he feels compelled to say something about his boss’s missing wife.

“Postmortem changes, changes after death, don’t make someone shorter,” I agree.

“An imposing woman,” Galbraith says, and it flickers in my mind he didn’t like her. “I think anybody who met Mrs. Lott was struck by how statuesque she was.”

“Exactly,” Shelly Duke agrees, and it occurs to me that they don’t want to be here. “A stunning, overwhelming woman. She filled a room, just dominated it when she walked in, and I mean it in the best way,” she adds, with sadness that is unconvincing.