Barrett gritted his teeth. “No, you’re right.” Whether Gutman had unlocked it or not, the police would have gotten into it eventually. Culligan had warned him of that and said he was on top of it. “Go on. What makes you think they’re leaning toward suicide?”

“They wanted to know why I was so worried about her last night. Why I texted her and called her so many times.”

Barrett eyed him. “How many times are we talking?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Here.” Gutman reached into his breast pocket and came out with two folded sheets of paper. “They printed it out.”

Barrett took the pages from him and smoothed them out. The first was a printout of Gutman’s unanswered texts to Lucy:

Sunday 7:27 PM

Are U OK?

Sunday 8:12 PM

Call me

Sunday 8:48 PM

Please come home

Sunday 9:18 PM

Lucy?

She hadn’t responded to any of them. Her only outgoing text appeared at the bottom of the page. Barrett already knew about that one, because she’d sent it to him.

He shuffled to the second page, which was a printout of the missed calls to Lucy’s cell phone. Between eight thirty and midnight last night, Elliott had placed six calls to her cell. Barrett already knew from the internal phone system that Elliott had placed another six to Lucy’s office line.

“Elliott—what the hell?” He chucked the pages onto the coffee table.

“I was worried, okay? She was so upset yesterday. For weeks, really, but yesterday—I don’t know. It scared me, the way she was acting. I told her to stay home, relax, watch some TV, but she insisted on going to the office. And when she didn’t answer, I got even more worried. So I kept on trying. Hoping she’d answer. Until you called”—Gutman sucked in a big breath—“and I knew not to hope anymore.”

He clapped his hand over his mouth and nose and held it there so long that Barrett almost wondered if he might suffocate himself. And if so, why he hadn’t done it a few hours earlier.

“Did you tell them why she was upset?”

“They said we must have had a fight!” He lifted his hand from his mouth and raked it through his wiry hair. “They actually implied I was having an affair—”

“Elliott. What did you tell them?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to stand for that accusation! So I told them she was a little blue about something she read in the newspaper that morning. She is—was—a tenderhearted person. When bad things happen to people, she takes it to heart.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, they pressed me on it. What specifically did she read in the paper. Barry, they had her briefcase there. She had the Sunday Times in it, turned to that exact page. So I could hardly deny it.”

Barrett stared at him. He knew what page Elliott was talking about. He knew what the article had reported. A typhoon in the South China Sea had caused an entire Thai fishing fleet to sink. More than thirty boats were lost, and something like five hundred men drowned.