Riley shrugged. “They’re just routine tests.”

“We have to go notify the victim’s family now,” Cruz said. “But we’d like to pick up our conversation when we get back. If that’s all right with you.”

“Of course. Whatever I can do to help.”

“It’s best if we talk over at CID,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind riding over there and waiting for us.”

“Riding?”

“In a patrol car. The uniforms will take you to CID and get you settled until we get back.”

“All right.”

“It shouldn’t be more than an hour or two.”

“That’s fine.”

That meant two more hours of waiting, after however many hours I’d waited already. But it would give me time to recover, time for the tinnitus to fade, time to shut down the strobing replay of Lucy’s face. I’d have time to gather my thoughts and time to prepare my opening statement, my presentation of the evidence, and my closing argument to my jury of two. By then I’d be ready for them.

Chapter 4

Lucy’s kitchen was immaculate. All the hard surfaces were polished to a high gleam, with not a smudge on the stainless, not a crumb on the granite. She had a housekeeper, of course, but Barrett was certain that the state of this room was all down to Lucy. She was equally as anal at the office, with never more than a single document on her desk and often not even that. Likewise all the surfaces here were bare. The spices were alphabetized, the cans in the pantry organized by expiration date, the knives precisely lined up like miniature samurai swords on the magnetic rack. This was Lucy, all right. She was too fastidious for her own good.

Barrett’s phone buzzed. It was the call he’d been waiting for. “Anything?” He kept his voice low. The husband was in the next room and the children asleep upstairs.

“Nothing in her office,” Jack Culligan reported. “Nothing on her computer. Nothing unusual on the video.”

Lester Willard came down the back stairs, ducking his head to clear the ceiling. He was all in black, skin and clothes, even down to his black latex gloves. Barrett directed the same question to him. “Anything?”

“No, sir.”

“You got everything in place?”

“Yes, sir. House and car.”

Barrett put Culligan on speaker so Lester could hear, too. The three of them comprised his entire crisis response team now that Lucy was gone. CEO Phil Duvall should have been here with them, too, but he’d made it clear that he didn’t want to be consulted, updated, or even blind-copied. Plausible deniability were his watchwords.

“We can’t rule out her briefcase and handbag,” Culligan said. “But our man on the desk watched the cops search them at the scene, and they didn’t react like there was any kind of note inside.”

“Okay,” Barrett said, but he knew it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t enough that Lucy hadn’t left a note confessing everything. It wouldn’t shut down the questions. A woman with no history of mental illness, successful in her career and happy in her home life, didn’t kill herself for no reason. People would go looking for that reason. They’d ask questions, and other people would start to remember things, like how upset she’d seemed after that last trip to Myanmar, or how strangely she’d behaved at that seminar last month. Somebody would put it all together. He’d done all the damage control he could think of, but it wasn’t enough. He reached for a cigarette and flicked his lighter, and as the flame burst out, he imagined the feel of it, licking at his feet. I could burn this place down.