Cruz resumed the lead. “How much time passed from the 911 call until the gunshot?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t even guess. It seemed like we were in there for hours.” Hours before the shot and hours after the shot, too. It was those hours afterward that stretched out the longest in my memory. Trapped in that cage with the smell of smoke and blood.

“You had her phone. You didn’t glance at the time?”

“No. I turned it off. The battery was almost depleted.” I thought for a minute. “The guard, the other men in the lobby—didn’t they tell you when they heard the shot?”

“Unfortunately, no. The janitors were running their floor polishing machines, and they had headphones on. The guard was watching the game on TV. Nobody heard a thing.”

“Oh.” That possibility hadn’t occurred to me.

“So we don’t know when the gun was fired,” Riley put in. “How long after the 911 call. If it was after the 911 call.”

“What? You think—?” My mouth dropped open. “No! Obviously she was still alive when I made that call. You could hear her in the background!”

“We listened to the 911 tape,” Cruz said. “She never spoke.”

“No, but— Well, I put the phone to her mouth. She must’ve—She was hyperventilating. You must have heard that!”

“We heard somebody.”

“That was Lucy! She was alive when I made that call. I tried to get her to talk to the operator, but she was already in full-blown panic.”

“Okay, so you made the call. Then what?”

“I turned the phone off, like I said, to conserve the battery. I told Lucy that help was on the way, but by then she was definitely hyperventilating. I tried to calm her down. Take slow breaths, I said, or something like that. In and out, nice and deep and slow. But she didn’t seem to hear me. I reached out to touch her, to stroke her arm or pat her back or something. I kept trying to calm her down. I said, Help’s on the way. We’ll be out of here in no time. Everything’s fine. You know, like that. But her breathing just sounded worse, and then it sounded like she was gasping, you know? And I turned her phone back on to use the flashlight to see how she was. She was reaching into her purse. I thought maybe she had an inhaler. Maybe she had asthma. But it was a gun.”

“She had a gun in her purse.”

I nodded. “I kinda reared back, you know? She was staring at it in her hand. I said, Oh, no, or Put that away, or something. Then she put it under her chin.”

“Show me.”

“Like this.” I mimed a gun with my thumb up and index finger out, then turned my hand until the finger touched the underside of my chin. “I screamed No! and I dropped the phone and lunged for her. I grabbed her hands, and I pulled the gun out from under her chin. But she fought me. She fought me so hard. And she twisted her arms around, and my arms, too, and then it was like the whole elevator exploded.”