“The gun was Lucy’s,” I said. “Didn’t you check the registration?”

“It’s not registered. It’s a ghost gun.”

I peered at him. “A goat gun?”

“Ghost,” he said, exaggerating the enunciation. “Homemade.”

“Wow. Really?”

“So far we can’t tell whose it was.”

“You should tell the lab to check for fingerprints on the remaining bullets in the cylinder. That’ll tell you who loaded it, which would establish who it belonged to.”

Cruz glanced at Riley, who lifted one shaggy eyebrow. “Sounds like you know your way around guns,” he said.

I saw the trap and sidestepped it. “No, but I read a lot of mysteries. You pick things up.”

“Yeah, right,” Riley said. “Between that and CSI and Law and Order, everybody’s an expert.”

“Anyway.” Cruz looked uncomfortable with Riley’s sarcastic tone, almost apologetic. “It turns out the cylinder was empty. And there aren’t any usable prints on the spent casing. Or on the trigger.”

“Oh.” I considered that. No registration. No fingerprint evidence. Nothing to point to me as the owner or the shooter of that gun. “Well, it wasn’t my gun,” I said. “You won’t find anything in my apartment to connect me to it. Or anything to connect me to Lucy beyond the fact that we work for the same company.” I dashed my signature across the bottom of the last consent form. “But feel free to look. The key’s in my purse. You have that, I think?”

“Thank you.” Cruz put the forms in the folder and closed it. “Need anything before we get started? Something to drink? A bathroom break?”

“I’m fine.”

He reached under the table, and a green light began to glow on the camera above the mirror. Recording must now be under way. The camera was pointed over the shoulders of the detectives, so that their faces—and their facial expressions—would remain off-camera. Only their voices would be recorded, and they’d be sure to keep those perfectly neutral, while my every expression, down to the smallest tic, would be captured on video. The face I wanted the detectives to see was cooperative, compliant, and above all innocent, and that was the face I tried to show them now.

Cruz established the preliminaries—time and place, persons in the room, consent form signed and acknowledged. He was doing the spade-and-shovel work of this interview, while Riley sat back and looked bored. I could see the dynamic of their partnership. Cruz was the young up-and-comer, eager and disciplined and by the numbers, while Riley was probably cruising through the second or third extension of his mandatory retirement date, doing little more than punching a clock until he punched out for good.

Cruz asked me to state my name, then my address, and when I named my street in the Bronx, I could see his surprise. He’d expected me to live somewhere better. So had I, once. Married? Yes, to David Lambert, and I could see his surprise again. Professional women of my generation typically used their own names.