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for the truth?” he asked. “That the truth comes out of the interrogation?”
    “Not always,” she said. “The Blake case, and Abbott. Both confessions recanted . . .”
    “But upheld by the courts,” he countered. “It’s hard to deny what’s on the record, the spoken word . . .”
    And now Trent knew what disturbed him about Sarah Downes, beyond her doubts about his interrogations. Somehow, she reminded him of Lottie. Not on the surface. Sarah Downes was cool and poised and elegant. Lottie had been disorganized, often in disarray, particularly after a few margaritas with her friends. She had also been warm and affectionate toward everyone, from stray kittens to old men on park benches.
    But the skepticism, the doubt in Sarah Downes’s voice and manner echoed Lottie and that last sad conversation with her the night before she died.
    “I don’t know you anymore,” Lottie had said. “Who are you, anyway?”
    And because she’d obviously been drinking, Trent answered lightly: “What you see is what you get.”
    “I’m not sure what I see,” Lottie retorted, alert suddenly, eyes flashing, voice crisp and flat.
    Taken aback by the lightning change in her manner, Trent thought of his days and nights away from home, time spent at the department, on the road for interrogations, the endless pursuit of the right answers. He saw how much he had neglected her, having assumed that she was content with her volunteer work at the animal shelter, her afternoon drinks with friends, the books in which she immersed herself.
    “But, wait,” she said, “I do know who you are.” Voice rising as if she’d made a startling discovery. “You are an interrogator. That’s what you do. And you are what you do.”
    You are what you do.
    Like an accusation.
    That had been their last conversation. She’d been asleep when he went to bed after studying his notes for the Lane case and still sleeping soundly when he left for headquarters early the next morning. By nightfall, he stood beside her hospital bed in a hopeless vigil. She had been the victim of a freak accident, a minor collision of automobiles in which the air bag and seat belt conspired to cause her death—trapped by safety devices suddenly turned lethal. Lottie died during the night, without regaining consciousness. Thus began the period of mourning from that day to this, eighteen months later, mourning the lost years ahead they might have shared and the past years that had been wasted.
    You are what you do.
Her final indictment of him.
    He shook off these thoughts, bringing himself gratefully back to the limo, the landscape passing muted and surrealistic outside the tinted window. And Sarah Downes sitting beside him, legs crossed now, one foot in the sensible low-heeled shoe swinging back and forth, back and forth.
    Body language. At which Trent had made himself adept for his interrogations. The small clues of movement, the use of hands and feet, the body tense or relaxed, leaning forward or drawing away, the attitude of the chin and the trembling of eyelids, all the telltale signs. What clues did Sarah Downes now supply? That swinging foot, her folded arms guarding her chest, the small beat of the pulse in her temple.
    “Tell me about the victim,” Trent said. “The child.”
    “Alicia Bartlett. Seven years old,” she said, sighing. “Precocious. But a nice little girl. Polite and well bred. Excellent grades in school. Utterly feminine. Loved her American Girl doll Amanda. Hobby: jigsaw puzzles, even in this day of computer games. She and Jason Dorrant worked at a puzzle during that last visit.”
    Trent conjured up pictures of twelve-year-old Jason Dorrant with seven-year-old Alicia Bartlett, heads bent together as they worked over a jigsaw puzzle. They, too, were a puzzle to be solved.
    Sarah Downes’s swinging foot now stopped.
    Trent waited. Finally she said: “I wonder . . .” Then faltered, shifted her body and fell silent.
    “And what do you