“So okay,” she cleared her throat, did her best to sound brisk. This is Sergeant D.D. Warren, all business all the time. “Regarding my person of interest. Tonight, I ambush him with the news—”

“You told him his wife was pregnant.”

“Exactly.”

“But how do you know that the test strip belonged to the wife?”

“I don’t. But she’s the only adult female in the house, and they don’t entertain, I mean never, so it’s a safe assumption. The lab geeks are gonna run DNA on the test strip to be definitive, but I gotta wait three months for those reports, and let’s be honest, Sandra Jones doesn’t have three months.”

“Just asking,” Bobby said.

“So, being strategic, I drop that little bomb into our conversation.”

“And?”

“He doesn’t react. Nothing. Nada. His face was so blank I could’ve told him it was raining outside.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. You gotta figure if he’s surprised, well then, he should choke up, because now both his wife and unborn child might be in danger. He should jump off the couch, start asking more questions, hell, start demanding more answers. Do anything but sit there like we’re talking about the weather.”

“In other words, he probably did know,” Bobby filled in. “His wife got pregnant by another man, he kills her, now he’s covering his tracks. That’s not rocket science, D.D. Hell, that’s a national trend.”

“And if we were talking about a normal person, I’d agree with you.”

“Define ‘normal,’”Bobby said.

She sighed heavily. This is where things got murky. “Okay, so I’ve been dealing with this guy for two days now. And he’s cool. Arctic cold. Miswired in some deep fundamental way that probably should involve a lifetime of therapy, six kinds of pharmaceuticals, and a total personality transplant. But he is who he is, and I’ve noticed a pattern to his deep freeze.”

“Which is?” Bobby was starting to sound impatient. Okay, so it was almost midnight.

“The more personal something is, the more he shuts down. Like this morning. We’re interrogating his four-year-old daughter in front of him. She’s recounting her mother’s last words, which don’t sound promising, let me tell you. And this guy is leaning against the back wall as if a switch has been disconnected. He’s there, but he’s not there. That’s what I thought tonight when I told him his wife was pregnant. He disappeared. Just like that. We were both in the room together, but he’s gone.”

“Sure I can’t take a crack at him?”

“Fuck you,” D.D. informed him.