“My hair?”
“Did you take a shower?”
“Yes, I did. When I came home, I went straight to the bathroom. I was trying to wake myself up.”
“Well, this is no dream, Jack. This is as real as real can be. When you showered, had you seen Colleen?”
“I had no idea she was here.”
“You hadn’t told her to come over?”
“No, Justine, I didn’t. No.”
The doorbell rang again.
CHAPTER 4
The arrival of Dr. Sci and Mo-bot improved the odds of figuring out what had happened in my house by 200 percent.
Dr. Sci, real name Seymour Kloppenberg, was Private’s chief forensic scientist. He had a long string of degrees behind his name, starting with a PhD in physics from MIT when he was nineteen-and that was only ten years ago.
Mo-bot was Maureen Roth, a fifty-something computer geek and jack-of-all-tech. She specialized in computer crime and was also Private’s resident mom.
Mo had brought her camera and her wisdom. Sci had his scene kit packed with evidence-collection equipment of the cutting-edge kind.
We went to my room and the four of us stood around Colleen’s dead body as night turned the windows black.
We had all loved Colleen. Every one of us.
“We don’t have much time,” Justine said, breaking the silence, at work now as an investigator on a homicide. “Jack, I have to ask you, did you have anything to do with this? Because if you did, we can make it all disappear.”
“I found Colleen like this when I got home,” I said.
“Okay. Just the same,” said Justine, “every passing minute makes you more and more the guy who did it. You’ve got to call it in, Jack. So let’s go over everything, fast and carefully. Start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”