Someone has already called this morning, I thought, which would be unusual, or alternatively they had called in the night after I’d gone, which would be stranger still. I stood in the center of my office, considering. Push the button and get it over with? Or delay? There was something ominous about that light and its blinking. That, and it was too early to listen to the voice of another human, someone I knew, speaking my name with some demand—the thought was repulsive.

I would go and make a pot of coffee first, I decided, before I let whatever was behind that red eye intrude. A pot of coffee and a good, careful thinking over of all of yesterday—then I would feel more equipped to push the button marked play. I set the leather briefcase down gently on the floor beside the desk.

The hallway was deserted; the break room, too. Someone had ripped open a packet of sugar and spilled it in an impressive arc across the counter; I tidied it up, rinsed out the coffeepot, and set it to brew.

Now, I thought, I will open my mind to the investigation; I will welcome in whatever thoughts that come. It was clear that the most important sequence of events had begun with the young man at the front desk’s unexpected announcement that my bag, or rather, Daniel Shriver’s bag, had been picked up by a “representative,” and culminated in the vase of white lilies falling to the floor with a crash. With the briefcase, I corrected myself, with its appearance, and then, I thought, or was the last in the important sequence of events in fact the piece of paper wedged under my windshield wiper? The missions were furnaces of death, it read, a phrase not easy to forget. But in the end, after some thought, I rejected the connection. It was bizarre and irritating, whoever was doing it should be reprimanded, and not only that, but the logistics of it were difficult to understand, but it had nothing to do with me, and I would not waste my time thinking of it.

Next I had a moment of doubt. Because I hadn’t actually seen her face—had it really been the guest lecturer sitting there at the bar with her back to me? I closed my eyes and pictured her: that brassy hair in the reddish candlelight, the white of the suit jacket. It had to be her.