I followed him to the sitting room without looking at Lydia. He pointed me to a sofa across from the fireplace where I couldn’t see the dining room or her body. “You’ll have to wait here for Homicide,” he said, and left.

“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered. It was the older man’s voice, coming from the dining room, low and close to tender.

“Look at the picture,” his partner said.

There was silence. “We got a creep maybe—someone who’ll do it twice.”

“Might could be rape. It’s funny—Rayfield was sending Watkins until I said her name, and then he decided to come himself.”

“Look around you,” the older man said. “She used to be somebody.”

There was no malice in that, just fact and a little kinship, as though Lydia Cantwell had taken a great fall quickly and thus qualified for sympathy. My throat was dry.

The front door opened, there were murmured greetings, and footsteps near the body. A new voice—soft and flat—asked, “Called the medical examiner?” “Yessir,” the older man said, and then two plainclothesmen walked into the sitting room.

The thin one had a neat mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and the meticulous intense look of a demolition expert. But it was the second man who held my attention. He was perhaps fifty, with a large potato face and small cobalt eyes at once pained and bleak and totally absorbed, the eyes of a bitter saint. They lit on me, appraising.

“I’m Rayfield,” he said and inclined his head toward the younger man. “This is Sergeant Bast.”

I nodded without speaking. Four uniformed police came briskly through the front door with ropes, cameras, and sketch pads, headed for the dining room. The last one carried a black doctor’s bag. “Ready to go, Lieutenant,” he called.

Rayfield glanced over. “Rope it off,” he ordered, and walked out.

The young patrolman appeared next to a vase of white chrysanthemums, watching me. I didn’t look up.

“Feel her armpits?” someone asked. “She’s room temperature.”

Another said, “She’s eight hours old, anyhow. They get this cold no way to tell for sure. Rape test’s not much good.”

“Do it anyway,” Rayfield said. Cameras began spitting.

The impersonal noise of strangers—doors opening, footsteps, orders, slamming drawers—came to me like the sound of television through an open window. Someone clambered up the stairs. I lit a Camel, forcing myself to watch Rayfield as he backed into the sitting room. He was around six-two, thick-bodied and awkwardly careful of movement, as if trapped in his own skin. His suit and tie were just something to wear, his gray wavy hair was cut military-style, his stare at the Cantwells’ furnishings abstemious and disapproving. He turned to me, asking, “You’re her lawyer?”

“That’s right.” My mouth was acrid with vomit taste and I needed some water. Instead I took a deep, harsh drag of cigarette smoke and stood.