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The older officer says nothing. He's looking past Laszlo, into the kitchen, at me, scanning me from head to toe. Whatever conclusion he reaches, I can tell he's decided he's going to make us say it out loud anyway.

"Miss," he says. "You all right?"

"I'm fine," I squeak, my gaze going left to right and down, directed anywhere but at them. I put a strand of still damp hair behind my ear. How could he have figured it out just by looking at me? I could die. I could lie down on this nice warm kitchen floor and simply die. This is the most embarrassing moment of my life.

From the corner of my eye, I spy my husband. Laszlo leans against the doorframe, entirely comfortable, in no rush whatsoever. He doesn't seem bothered or embarrassed. Why am I even surprised?

"No one's been murdered," he says. "You can tell your caller to relax. That was my wife. I bought us a burial plot up there, and we thought we'd try it out before we commit to eternity. She found the experience … very moving. What you heard was her showing her appreciation. At length."

The young officer's pen stops dead. Then the coughing starts, a sudden, desperate fit of it, like his own body is trying to rescue him from the conversation. His complexion climbs from pink to a deep, tragic scarlet, and the harder he seems to fight it the worse it gets, until he's bent slightly at the waist, hacking into his fist, entirely undone by a single sentence.

"She's a surgeon, my wife, a pragmatic type. Quite introverted," Laszlo adds, gesturing at me like this closes the case. "If I'd actually been killing her, she'd have gone through the business of dying far more efficiently. No screaming. Very neat. Professional courtesy."

The older officer breathes out slowly through his nose. He wears the expression of a man who's given the best years of his life to this job and is now standing on a doorstep wondering why.

Neither of them has any idea who Laszlo is. That’s pretty obvious. They’ve just listened to this stranger, likely from out of town unless he’s a regular visitor here, who's happily admitted to having sex in a graveyard.

The young one is now staring at his boots, shoulders shaking, the odd cough still escaping him.

"Right," the veteran says eventually. "So, no one’s dead."

"No one’s dead," Laszlo agrees.

The younger officer, who's finally stopped trying to cough up a lung on Laszlo's doorstep, looks up at him, then at me, then up at the sky for a second, jaw working. Perhaps he's quietly asking God why this, why him, why today of all the days in the twenty-first century.

"That's a graveyard, sir," he says. "There are people's loved ones resting there, their grandparents and parents and spouses..."

"And now they've got something to talk about," Laszlo asserts with a nod.

That is it. Laszlo’s comeback finishes the young one off. He folds over and dissolves into coughing again, worse than before, hacking into his fist. Makes me think he might not make it off this visit alive.

CHAPTER 29

Laszlo

The room I use for interrogation is the smallest of the three prep rooms at the Basset house, another of my properties, an hour and a quarter from the Hudson Valley place, on a big private plot in Alpine, gated and set back from the road. It has the best drainage system and soundproof walls. A man can make as much noise as he wants down here and the bereaved sitting in the chapel upstairs will never hear a thing.

The guy Rafe pulled off Ferro's floor is strapped into the chair, and he's been talking for ten minutes without telling me anything. Before that, he was left alone for a half hour in this room to ponder his sins. I'm not in a hurry about it. It's not even two in the morning. My wife is working, so I have all night to get creative.

I line up the tools on the steel tray beside him. They don't need lining up, but it's an interrogation technique I've been perfecting for years. I like the small clean sound the metal makes, and the man sitting in front of me is not hard of hearing.

"Stop staring at the drain," I tell him. "I know it's interesting, but it’s distracting. It's one of the reasons why I bought the place, you know. Easier cleanup."

"Please. I don't know anything."

"You've said. Many times." I pick up the smallest blade, hold it to the light, set it back down a little to the left. "Here's my trouble. Somebody walked into my house. That same somebody stood next to the bed on my wife’s side, and left an ear on the dish where she keeps her rings. I wonder about the person who did that and how they know where exactly to place that item. We’ve established that you run errands for people who’d look for that information. So we'll sit here until you remember."

He wets his lips. "They'll kill me."

"They already did. They sent you into a room with me.” I turn the blade a quarter on the tray. "You didn’t have the key. Whoever had it and used it, it’s him I want. You were around when things were being decided."

He shakes his head. "I never met him. None of us have. He's not one of ours. They put him in a Ferro's coat and bring him in from outside for personal work, then he's gone."

"Outside where."

"Not from here. From the old country. That's all anyone says about him. We don’t go around talking about it."

The door opens behind me. I already know it's Rafe. He has that walk, heavy and slow, that announces his presence quite soundly.