Albright’s smile disappeared. “I’m not saying anything else.” She stepped back and slammed the door.

(ii)

(WEDNESDAY, 6:12 P.M.)

“My client would like to clarify his earlier statements,” the lawyer said, addressing Mahler and ignoring Frames. A business card, slid halfway across the table, identified the lawyer as Thomas P. Stricker. Under Stricker’s name, the card read “All Felonies and Misdemeanors. Over 20 Years of Aggressive Criminal Defense.”

Mahler read the card without picking it up. He looked across the table. Christopher Bennett straightened his posture and ran his open palms down the front of a wool suit jacket. He imagined the man at the end of each day exchanging his starched white lab coat for a jacket. The two sides to Bennett’s life: the clean, exacting efficiency of his practice and the indulgent leisure it afforded him.

Mahler had faced dozens of men like Bennett, and he could see in the man’s eyes that the dentist’s ordinary life had been flipped upside down. The confidence with which he spoke to his patients, advising of them of crowns and implants, was shaken. The picture of himself as husband and father had been readjusted. But Mahler saw something else, too. Unlike other men, who by now were recalibrating how to break the fall to the bottom, Bennett had something about him that looked frayed and lost.

Mahler turned on the recorder, identified everyone present, and noted the time. He opened a file folder in front of him with a transcript of Bennett’s earlier interview. “What clarifications would your client like to make?”

Bennett took a deep breath and let it out. “I was in a relationship with Elise Durand. For the last six months, I saw her several times a week. Sometimes in my car and sometimes in a room at the Hyatt. We were…intimate. We had sex.”

“How was that going?”

“How was it going?” Bennett shook his head in disbelief. “I was in love with her. Flat out. Like a kid. I told her. I told her I’d leave Lynn and marry her.”

“But you didn’t do that.”

“I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where to begin.”

“How did Ms. Durand respond?”

“She was all over the place. Up one day, down the next. She wanted to get married, then she didn’t. She started asking for things. First a car. Lately, it was a house. Jesus, I offered to cosign a note for a condo.”

Frames understood the flatness in Mahler’s tone. If Rivas had been the teacher in the interrogation four hours before, Mahler was the Zen master. Mahler’s questions were so plain and quiet they left all the air in the room for Bennett to fill. Each word was like a gentle hand at the suspect’s back, urging him forward. Frames now pitched his voice in imitation. “But you didn’t, right? What happened?”