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“Does it?” Archie replied.

“Yes. It seems to me it’s something he’d mention.”

Swenson waited for his answer. Archie let his expression do the talking. Swenson looked instinctively to Beau.

Beau said, “Let’s go back over your movements on Friday.”

“Starting...when?”

“Dawn to dusk.”

Archie hesitated.

Beau said, “Sorry. Isn’t that how you do it in the Bureau?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t handle homicides.”

Beau’s smile was odd. “No. What do you do? Because none of John’s friends or family seem very clear.”

“Is there some reason people in Twinkleton need to know what I do?”

“Are you ashamed of it?”

Archie, too tired to be careful, said slowly, “Man, you really did turn out to be an asshole.”

In the silence that followed, he could hear the distant ring of a landline phone going unanswered, the crackle and buzz of a police radio with a staticky update, and the sound of the HVAC laboring to blow tepid air through the aged vents.

“You think so?” Beau asked pleasantly. “Would you like to find out how much of an asshole I can be?”

“No, I believe you,” Archie replied.

Swenson looked from Archie to Beau and from Beau to Archie.

“Good. Answer the question,” Beau said.

“I slept until one o’clock—”

Beau looked at him with open disbelief. “You slept until one o’clock?”

There was no need to explain himself, but Archie said a little defensively, “We flew in the day before. I was jet-lagged.”

“Sure. You slept till one. Then what?”

“John and I had lunch.”

“How did John seem? What did you talk about?”

They had been over this, of course, in the first interview. But that’s how it worked. You kept asking the same questions in the hope that the answers would start to change.

“We didn’t talk a lot.” Archie thought back. “John seemed...maybe a little preoccupied. I thought he was tired. I was.”

“I’ll say. And after lunch?”

“John said he had some phone calls to make.”

“Who to?”

“No idea.”