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your wife been arguing in recent days, sir? And hadn’t one of those arguments been about a photo on her cell phone?” Champlain watched her evenly. He said nothing. “And during one of those arguments, hadn’t you said that if you wanted to, you could make her disappear and no one would ever find her?”
    He looked at the other detective, who was making a subtle sound in his throat. “No,” he said.
    Hunter was about to ask him about the necklace when Martin came into the room, waving a folder as if something had just come up. He handed it to Kyle Samuels and touched Hunter’s shoulder. Meaning she was relieved.
    She looked back before closing the door. Champlain gave her a shrewd, wide-­eyed look. It could’ve meant anything.
    â€œ ‘Two questions’?” Martin said. He looked like a dad about to upbraid his teen daughter. “Can you put that in writing, about the photo?”
    â€œOf course.”
    Gerry Tanner came into the room a few minutes later and sat down. The three of them watched the interview in silence for a while, jotting notes.
    â€œIf he’s not guilty, he’s a good actor,” Tanner said, to Hunter.
    â€œEven if he is guilty,” she said. In fact, the whole thing resembled a performance, Hunter was thinking. When Champlain let his guard down, his wife’s death seemed an inconvenience more than anything else—­than a tragedy or a personal loss.
    â€œHe’s cooperating,” Tanner said, after Martin left the room, “but he wouldn’t turn over his phone. Did you hear that?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œClaims confidential business transactions. He gave Dunn his business manager’s name.”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    Hunter wrote it down and filed a mental note to ask Dunn about this. She stayed for the remainder of the interview and then, after Tanner left, she stayed while state police investigators recorded interviews with Joseph Sanders, Elena Rodgers, and Sally Markos, all of whom had worked for Champlain.
    Sanders, Champlain’s driver and “assistant,” was a large, gruff-­speaking man with a beat-­up-­looking face who seemed to struggle with some of his sentences. He had been out fishing alone in his runabout that afternoon, he said, then stopped at a bar called the Harbor Loon, at about 7 P.M ., to have “a ­couple” beers. He was “off duty” today, he said three or four times.
    Elena Rodgers, a personal assistant to Champlain, was an athletic-­looking woman in her late thirties, wearing a dark windbreaker and a slightly sullen expression. She had been in her room at the Old Shore Inn all afternoon reading, then joined her boss in the private dining room at Kent’s Crab House several minutes past nine. It was a “business meeting slash dinner,” she said. Rodgers was terse and businesslike and several times flashed a look of impatience—­an upside-­down smile—­as if disgusted that the detectives had found it necessary to interview her.
    Sally Markos, Champlain’s house cleaner, was a dark, waifish-­looking woman with frizzy shoulder-­length hair. She couldn’t get through more than a few words without crying, a response that became almost theatrical at times, Hunter thought. She’d been home with her husband, she said, watching television tonight. She named the shows: Wheel of Fortune , followed by Jeopardy and back-­to-­back episodes of Forensic Files .
    None of the interviews was very useful, although something about Sanders’s story felt off. The detectives picked up on that, Hunter noticed. Some of it may’ve been that he was drinking and had to sober up to talk with them. But there was a discrepancy in his recollection of times—­when he’d arrived at the bar, when he’d left—­that sounded as if he was spontaneously trying to invent an alibi. And when this discrepancy was