"Did she have any disease that made a stroke likely? Diabetes, for example?"

"No."

"Was your sister taking birth-control pills?"

"Yes."

"That might have caused or contributed. Did she smoke?"

"No. The point is, the autopsy showed no abnormal cause for the stroke. No strange drugs, no poisons, nothing like that."

"Did your sister's husband resist the autopsy?"

Agent Morse actually beamed with approval. "No. He didn't."

"But you still believed her? You really thought her husband might have killed her?"

"Not at first. I thought she must have been hallucinating. But then-" Agent Morse looked away from Chris for the first time, and he stole a glance at her scars. Definitely lacerations caused by broken glass. But the punctate scarring indicated something else. Small-caliber bullets, maybe?

"Agent Morse?" he prompted.

"I didn't leave town right away," she said, focusing on him again. "I stayed for the funeral. And over the course of those three days, I thought a lot about what Grace had told me. That's my sister's name, Grace. She told me she thought her husband was having an affair. He's a wealthy man-far wealthier than I realized-and Grace believed he was involved with another woman. She believed he'd murdered her rather than pay what it would have cost him to divorce her. And to get custody of their son, of course."

Chris considered this. "I'm sure women have been killed for that reason before. Men, too, I imagine."

"Absolutely. Even completely normal people admit to having homicidal impulses when going through a divorce. Anyway…after Grace's funeral, I told her husband I was going back to Charlotte."

"But you didn't."

"No."

"Was he having an affair?"

"He was. And Grace's death didn't slow him down in the least. Quite the reverse, in fact."