“If she’d been frightened and worried someone was trying to break in,” Lott replies, and I detect annoyance and impatience beneath his charm, “she wouldn’t have turned off the alarm and gone out into the dark at that hour. Not when she was there alone.”

He’s the type to get frustrated with people not as smart and determined as he, and that would be almost everyone.

“Millie was very security-conscious,” Lott says to me. “She absolutely didn’t go out of the house that night because she heard a noise, was scared of someone or something. Most assuredly not. That was the last thing she would have done. When she was scared, she called the police. She certainly didn’t hesitate to call nine-one-one. I’m sure you’ve talked to the Gloucester police and are aware they were quite familiar with her and our property. In fact, several officers had been to the house just days before when Jasmine disappeared.”

I tell Channing Lott I’m very sorry but I have people waiting for me. I’ll be happy to review the security footage, although it’s unlikely I’ll have anything to add that hasn’t already been observed by others who have viewed it. I push back my chair because I feel he’s making a case for his innocence and I don’t intend to be manipulated.

“It just nags at me.” He makes no move to leave. “Who was it? Who could she have been talking to? You see the prevailing theory, and one that the prosecution continued to beat like a drum, is she was talking to me. She’s come out into the yard and is saying something to me.”

“A theory based on what?” I ask him, and I probably shouldn’t be asking him anything further. “Is there audio on the security video?”

“There isn’t, and you can see her only from the side. You can’t really make out how her lips are moving, not clearly. So to more precisely answer you, Dr. Scarpetta, the theory, like all of the theories about me, is based on nothing but the prosecution’s, the government’s, determination to win their case.”

He looks angry. He looks wronged, and it’s not lost on me he won’t refer to Dan Steward by name.

“I’m sure you saw all over the news that the prosecution suggested I wasn’t really traveling,” he says. “That my being in Tokyo the night Millie disappeared was a ruse somehow, that I actually was back here and in collusion with whoever I supposedly hired to murder her. The point the prosecution made relentlessly is my wife would never have left the house late at night unless the person she heard was someone she completely trusted.”

“Exactly right, she wouldn’t if she didn’t know who it was,” Shelly Duke agrees.