I watched the proceedings through the glass door of the little lobby office. Two other cops assembled some panels into a screen and set it up in front of the open doors of Car 3. It was a crime scene screen, I realized. They were treating the elevator as a crime scene. But suicide wasn’t a crime in the state of New York. Homicide was.

Another cop was herding three men in janitorial coveralls through the lobby. He had them sit on the floor at least twenty feet from one another. The witnesses were being sequestered.

Yet another cop was still standing guard outside my door. The suspect was being detained?

No. Of course not, I tried to convince myself. I was a witness, not a suspect. I was being sequestered, not detained. All of this was completely routine.

But my lawyer’s brain was too analytical to overlook the obvious. There were only two people in that elevator and only two possibilities—suicide or homicide. The police wouldn’t accept the first until they eliminated the second. That meant it was my job to convince them that I didn’t do it. I needed to prove that negative.

I waited and watched, and everyone else seemed to be waiting and watching as well. In the long silence I became aware of the ringing in my ears. I wasn’t sure whether it just started or whether it was only this moment that I noticed it. I remembered the sound of the gunshot so close to my ear. The blast had been deafening in that tiny space, swelling until it took up every cubic inch of the elevator car.

Car. Why did they call them cars? Elevators weren’t cars. In a car you were in control. You could stop, pull over, get out, walk free. They should call them what they were. Cages. That was what it felt like when I was trapped in there, in the dark.

My hands weren’t shaking anymore. Now it was my mouth that trembled, though if I clamped my jaws shut, I could hold it still. At the same time, though, the ringing in my ears was growing louder and louder. I wondered if my hearing might be permanently damaged, then I wondered how I could worry about something like that when I was lucky even to be alive. Our struggle over the gun had been ferocious—it was astonishing how fiercely such a small woman could fight—and it easily could have fired on me instead.

My hands started to shake again, and I clasped them together and held them tightly on the desk in front of me, like a schoolgirl. The best little girl in the class, that was what I always was, always attentive, always ready with the answer and my arm thrust in the air. Back in the days when that was all I needed to succeed.

Another image flashed through my memory. Lucy’s eyes as I wrestled her for the gun in the crazy kaleidoscope of light that played up from her phone on the floor. Her wild animal eyes. Lucy had a face like fine porcelain—smooth and utterly immobile. But during those last awful moments it shattered into a million tiny shards.