“No. No, I’m fine. Well, I mean—I don’t need medical attention.”

“Anything we can get for you?”

A few hours ago I was faint with hunger and almost delirious with exhaustion, but there was no way I could eat or sleep now. I shook my head.

“Is there anyone we can call for you?”

I shook my head again.

“Not your husband?” Cruz was staring at my wedding ring.

“No.” I folded my hands on my lap. “He’s—um—he’s not reachable.”

“We could send a patrol car for him,” he offered.

“No. No, you see—he works nights. But thank you.”

“Any friend we could call?”

“I wouldn’t want to bother them. Not at this hour.”

“Any other family?”

“No.” When he seemed to wait for more, I added: “My mother’s dead. I never knew my father. And I was an only child.”

He gave a sympathetic nod. He didn’t seem to be treating me like a suspect, or even like a witness. It was almost like I was a victim. In a way maybe I was.

The older detective, Riley, planted his hip on the edge of the desk. Up close I could see that he was much older. The skin under his eyes sagged like wet teabags. The hair on his head was gray, and so were the little tufts sprouting from his ears and nose, but his eyebrows were strangely black. They crawled like caterpillars across his brow as he studied me. “Can you tell us what happened?” His voice was an octave lower than Cruz’s and sounded like a rusty rowboat being dragged over a rocky beach.

I’d had sixty minutes—maybe ninety; I didn’t have a watch—to calm down and organize my thoughts and not blurt it out as I’d done before. My voice shook a bit, but I was able to relate the events coherently, from my arrival at the elevator bank on the thirtieth floor until the moment the doors finally opened on the ground floor.

Cruz absently stroked his goatee as he listened. “That musta been awful,” he said when I was done. “You sure we can’t call somebody for you?”

“No. But thank you.”

He pointed to the two Tyvek-clad women hovering outside the door. “Some folks here need to come in and get you a change of clothes and take some photos. If that’s all right with you?”

I hesitated. A victim would have no reason to refuse, and neither would a witness. Only a suspect would object, so obviously I couldn’t. “Of course. That’s fine.”

The detectives left, and the women came in. They wore caps over their hair and face masks over their mouths and noses. It was like they were wearing hazmat suits, and I felt a reflexive shame, like I was contagious or contaminated. One of them had a camera, and the other was carrying little plastic containers. “If you’d put your hands on the desk, please,” the first one said.

I spread my hands out, and she photographed them palms up and palms down. Then the other woman opened one of the plastic containers and removed a disc that she pressed against my right hand. It had adhesive backing, and I realized it was meant to collect gunshot residue.