“Thank you. I will find a way through the pain.” Tunney motioned to the vaguely-familiar-looking man flanking him. “Cody here tells me you were asking after our business today. You and a detective.”

I looked up at Cody and then recognized where I saw him before: He was the security guy in the butler suit at the Wooldridge mansion. “That’s right,” I said. “We asked Orval Wooldridge if Jimmy Albert had been talking with the security folks.”

“Jimmy Albert being the dispatcher who was working with his wife.”

“That’s right.”

“What did Wooldridge say?”

“He said he wouldn’t know and to ask his assistant.”

“Why were you asking after Albert?”

“Because he’s missing. Going on three days now.”

“And you think we have something to do with that.”

“Well, you know. Before I was kidnapped it might have been just a theory. Now I’m feeling pretty sure about it.”

This got a chuckle out of Tunney. “I’m sure you do. But you’re wrong.”

I held out my hands and looked around. “Convince me.”

Tunney glanced up again at Cody, and then back at me. “Cody says you also asked Wooldridge if he spoke with Jimmy Albert after his wife died.”

“Yes. He said he told him to get his final payment and that was it.”

“Cody,” Tunney said.

“That’s not what happened,” Cody said. “I was there. I saw the whole thing. Heard the whole thing.”

I looked up at Cody. “So what happened?”

Cody looked down at his boss and then back at me. “It’s complicated. I mean, I have to tell you more than just about the last day.”

“All right.”

“Jimmy was hired to dispatch Mrs. Wooldridge. He’d done it before and it all became pretty rote. It always went the same way. Jimmy would use that thing he called an ‘applicator’ and she would disappear from the third floor room and reappear in the master bedroom on the second floor.”

“How many times did Jimmy dispatch her?”

“A couple three dozen times, maybe. Maybe more.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s an unusual number,” Tunney prompted me.

“Yes.”

“How so?”

“It sounds like Jimmy was doing remediation. Resetting the client when some medical therapy or procedure isn’t working out. That can happen two or three times, or even more than that. But I’ve never heard anyone being remediated more than a dozen times.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s fucking cruel, that’s why not. You’re killing someone. If he’s using the applicator, it’s pushing a payload into that woman’s head and detonating it, every single time. Have you ever been dispatched?”

“No.”

“I have,” the other guy flanking Tunney said.

I looked up at him. “You remember it, right? All of it? Up to and including the minute you died.”

“Yeah.”

“How was that for you?”

“It was pretty fucked up.” The guy glanced down at Tunney. “Sorry, boss.”