“What did they say?”

“They wanted to know why bad weather on the other side of the planet would make her so upset that I’d call her so many times. So I explained—”

Barrett held his breath.

“I explained that it happened off the coast of Malaysia, so it wasn’t the other side of the world, as far as Lucy was concerned. It was her homeland. She felt a connection to those people.”

“That’s it?”

Gutman nodded.

“Okay,” Barrett said, and let his breath out again. “Okay. You did fine, Elliott.”

“But then the old one, Riley, started asking questions about you.”

“What about me?”

“About you and Lucy, specifically. How you worked hand in glove. How you traveled together a lot. He insinuated the most outrageous—”

“He was trying to rattle you. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”

“He said—he said—Obviously something was going on in her life that made her so unhappy and guilty that she couldn’t even medicate it away. I said, What are you talking about? And he said the medical examiner found an undigested tablet in her stomach, and they’d sent it to toxicology, but he guessed I knew what it was. So I told him Xanax.”

“Jesus, Elliott! He was lying. They haven’t even done the postmortem yet.”

“How was I to know? So I told him she had a high-stress job, and a little Xanax now and then got her through the day. And he said—he said—” The Adam’s apple bobbed in the man’s throat. “That’s one of those ads I hear on TV, isn’t it? Side effects may include thoughts of suicide.”

He moaned and dropped his head in his hands. Barrett pushed to his feet and walked to the windows and studied the low-hanging gray clouds in the sky until Gutman could pull himself together. In a few minutes Barrett heard a loud sniff and turned to see the man take his hands from his face and rake his fingers through the frizzle of his hair.

Barrett spent another fifteen minutes testing Gutman’s memory, seeing if he could dredge up anything else from his police interview. Nothing worse came out of his efforts, but nothing better, either. When he was finished, he called Marcia to arrange a driver to take Gutman home, and walked him to the elevator bank.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Gutman stared straight ahead at the gridwork of bars etched into the stainless-steel doors. “This is where she stood. This is where she got on.”

“Try not to think about it,” Barrett said. Fortunately the doors of Car 5 opened at that moment, so he didn’t have to muster up any more comforting words. Gutman stepped on, the doors closed, and Barrett all but sprinted back to his office.

“Jack,” he said when Culligan answered. “They have her phone. Are we ready with the rest?”

“Ready.”

“Then let’s get them over here ASAP.”

He disconnected and picked up the printout of text messages again. There, at the bottom of the page, Lucy’s final words, texted to Barrett at 8:45 last night.