After Mr. Contreras left, Lotty went to her clinic on Damen. I resisted the impulse to go back to bed and phoned Sister Carolyn instead. I wanted to know if she’d been able to find any more bottle fragments in Sister Frankie’s apartment.

“The police came almost as soon as you’d left. They wanted to know who broke the seal on Frankie’s door. I told them it must have been the intruder we chased down the stairs. They put a padlock on the door, so we can’t get in.”

“Bolt cutters,” I said absently, flexing my fingers inside their gauze wrappers, imagining working a pick into the padlock.

“We’ll think about that,” the nun said drily. “But I want to know who’s watching our building. When you were here, you said it was the federal government.”

“The feds came to see me in the hospital: someone from Homeland Security, someone from the FBI, and local guys from the Bomb and Arson squad. It was the day after the fire, so I don’t remember it clearly. They know who lives in your building, all the families. Come to think of it, they’re probably listening to this conversation, so forget the bolt cutters.”

“Eavesdropping!” Zabinska was almost speechless with fury.

I suggested she come see me at Lotty’s so we could talk about it privately. I wanted to speak to her anyway, now that I was more alert mentally, to learn anything Sister Frankie might have said to her about Steve Sawyer’s involvement in Harmony Newsome’s murder.

Before Lotty left, she had made me promise to stay inside. But I wanted to be in motion. After doing as much of a workout as I could handle, and having a phone meeting with Marilyn Klimpton at my office, I wandered restlessly around Lotty’s apartment. In the side room where she keeps her television (off-limits) and her library overflow (off-limits), I found a sewing basket with a pair of shears in it. I went into the bathroom and started chopping my hair.

When I was five, my father gave me a doll for Christmas that had a huge halo of dark hair. It was JFK’s first year in office, and dolls all had the Jackie do. Boom-Boom and I took a pair of scissors to that doll, and, by the time we’d finished, she looked much as I did now. Dentists shouldn’t drill their own teeth and detectives shouldn’t cut their own hair. At least, not when their hands were wrapped up in boxer’s tape.

A little after one, when I thought I might go mad from inaction, the cops showed up. They knew I’d been sprung; they probably knew Lotty wasn’t home. It was time to talk.

I put on my heavy dark glasses to underline my invalid status. Just to be prudent, I rode the elevator to the lobby to make sure they were really cops, not robbers. I hadn’t actually seen any of their faces in the hospital, but their voices told me these were essentially the same players who’d interrogated me last week.

The FBI had sent Lyle Torgeson again, but the feds had beefed up their presence with someone from Homeland Security. The city had sent only the woman from the Office of Emergency Management instead of the duo who’d come to my hospital room. The CPD sent the same two guys from the Bomb and Arson squad, a young white man with a crew cut who was already developing a paunch and a Latino about my own age who was balding and had big fatigue circles around his eyes.

“I don’t have Dr. Herschel’s permission to bring all these strangers into her home,” I told the doorman. “Is there a conference room we could use?”

“There’s a room in the building manager’s office,” the doorman said doubtfully. “It’s kind of small, though.”

“We can take you down to Thirty-fifth and Michigan,” the Latino Bomb and Arson guy suggested.

“You have a warrant?… Then we’ll meet here. There are only six of us, after all.”

The doorman called up to the building manager to see if the room was free and to send someone down to escort us so that he wouldn’t have to abandon his post at the entrance.

It was a small room, and getting six chairs around the round table meant we all had to be careful to keep our knees to ourselves. I was sorry in a way that I’d kept them out of Lotty’s place, but if they were uncomfortable inhaling one another’s bad breath, which the woman from OEM had to a remarkable degree, they wouldn’t stay long.

I kept my big plastic glasses on mostly to annoy them. They would want to try to read my facial tics, how I moved my eyes and so on, and now they couldn’t.

“You look like the bad end of a catfight,” Torgeson said. “You get your hair caught in a wringer over at the nun’s place when you went back there?”

“Everyone’s taping this, right? So the FBI and OEM and CPD are all going to get the same useful transcript. The real question here is”-I paused long enough to see that they were all leaning forward, hoping for some gem of self-revelation-“why is a woman always characterized as being in a catfight after an altercation? I’m sure with the research you’ve done on me, you know I have two dogs, so it’s a good bet I’d be more responsive to a dogfight metaphor. And yet your underlying sexism made you-”

“Enough,” Torgeson barked. “You know damned well what I was talking about.”

I shook my head. “Mind reading isn’t one of my skills. And I haven’t been tapping your phone, so I can’t rely on your conversations to tell me what you’re thinking or talking about.”

“Ms. Warshawski, we know you left Beth Israel to return to the nun’s apartment four nights ago.” It was the white guy from Bomb and Arson.

When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Well?”

“Is there a question?” I said.

“What were you doing at the nun’s building four nights ago?” he said, his voice tight from the effort not to lose his temper.

“I was in the hospital four nights ago,” I said.

When the HIV nun had escorted me back inside, she’d flashed her hospital ID at the security guard and stopped to chat briefly with one of the nurses. No one looked at me, a rookie nun, new to the HIV/ AIDS service, head lowered. No one on the fifth floor had commented on my absence, either, when I slipped back into my room or the next morning, so I didn’t think it had been noticed.

“You were seen entering the Freedom Center building,” the woman from OEM said. “What were you doing there?”

“I was seen?” I echoed. “That’s an old, old ploy. I need more than that to persuade me I was at Kedzie and Lawrence instead of in my hospital bed.”

The OEM woman pulled a set of stills from her briefcase and laid them on the small round table in the middle of the room. We all took turns looking at them. They were time-stamped, and they showed a woman whose dark hair held a few white streaks wearing jeans and a white shirt. They were shot from behind, so you couldn’t see where her hair had been shaved back from her temples. Nor could you see that she was using the edge of her plastic lenses to snap the tongue back in the front-door lock.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like this person is wearing a jacket marked ‘V. I. Warshawski.’ And I think I’d remember if I’d been there. You have some shots showing me leaving, some where I could see my face? I don’t recognize myself from behind.”

There was a momentary silence. I’d left wearing a nun’s veil, my face down, two other sisters and my cousin holding me close. They had the shots, but they probably didn’t know what to make of them.

“Look, Warshawski, this isn’t supposed to be an antagonistic meeting,” the Latino guy from Bomb and Arson said. “We assume you’re on the same team we are.”

“And what team would that be, Detective?’

“That you want to catch Sister Frances’s killer,” he said.

“Oh, I definitely want to do that,” I agreed.

“Then why don’t you tell us what you were doing at her apartment?” That was the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson.

I yawned. “I wasn’t at her apartment.”

“Let’s forget four nights ago,” Torgeson said. “The night of the fire… You agree you were there that night?… Tell us why.”