Langdon shook her head. “No, of course not. My personal record is seven minutes.”

I smiled at that.

There were two doors into Wooldridge’s private office. We entered from the one that faced out into the common hall and sat down in the two chairs in front of a massive mahogany desk. Wooldridge came out of the other one, situated on the other side of the desk, ten minutes later. As he did, Trimble following directly behind, I caught a glimpse of the bathroom on the other side of the door, presumably also connected to his bedroom suite. The bathroom appeared roughly the size of my entire apartment. The tub was the size of my bathroom. I admit it. I had envy for a moment.

Wooldridge was yelling at the two of us as he entered the office. “You’ve intimidated Garrett enough to drag me out of bed, but I assure you, Detective Langdon, Mr. Valdez, that I am not so easily impressed or intimidated.” He stood by the chair at his desk, not sitting, signaling that he had no intention of being in the room long enough to sit. “You have exactly two minutes to state your business, all of it. And you better believe tomorrow, Detective Langdon, that Chief Hammond is getting a phone call from me. You won’t like it when he calls you.”

“Mr. Wooldridge, you need to tell us where James Albert is,” Langdon said.

“Is that what you came here for? I already told you I had no idea what happened to him. The last I saw him he was taking a check from Garrett here.”

“The last time you saw him you were trying to attack him, Mr. Wooldridge,” I said. “You had to be physically restrained. You were blaming him for your wife’s death.”

“That’s simply not true.”

“It’s true that he’s not responsible for your wife’s death, sir.”

“Of course he is! He failed at his job.”

I shook my head. “No, Mr. Wooldridge. You remember earlier today, you asked me if I had ever heard of a dispatcher failing twice in a row. You asked me what the chances of that were. I told you it was one in a million. You remember that.”

“Yes of course,” Wooldridge said, irritably. “And now you have one minute left.”

“You said it was practically impossible that a dispatcher would fail twice in a row. And you’re right. It is practically impossible. It’s never happened. And it didn’t happen. Not to Jimmy.”

I nodded to Langdon. She swiped on her phone, which had a video frozen still on it. She held it up for Wooldridge to see.

Wooldridge sighed, exasperated. “I don’t have my glasses on. Tell me what that is.”

“It’s your wife, Mr. Wooldridge,” Langdon said. “It’s Elaine. And she left a message for you before she died. She left it with Jimmy.”