I am going to pass quickly over the rest, because the rest belonged to the law, and I had spent weeks making sure it would.

The detectives did not shout.

There was no struggle in the nave.

In a small room off the sanctuary they went through the ordinary, sober machinery of it, and when Jonathan’s own recorded voice played back from the device in the bridal bag, the threats he had made in a house he believed unwatched, his lawyer objected that it was an illegal recording, and Detective Harris answered, evenly, that the question of its use was one for the court and the prosecutor, not for a vestry, and that it had been secured as evidence of an ongoing felony and would be weighed accordingly.

I unclasped the pearl buttons and let the heavy five-thousand-dollar gown drape to the floor, standing in the plain ivory slip, and let the detective photograph what needed photographing for the record, the faded marks that a hospital had already documented two weeks before, in a report already logged with his department.