“So then what?” Mason asked.
“So I told them that I hadn’t paid too much attention to time, that it had seemed quite a long while to me because I had so much to do, but that it might have been less than an hour; perhaps forty-five minutes, or perhaps even half an hour. And then I got myself in a jack pot. The times were all wet.”
Mason frowned. “You mean,” he said, “that she had been dead for more than...”
“She’d been dead ever since midnight,” Drake said, “and probably before.”
“How do they know?”
“Taking the temperature of the room and the temperature of the body and estimating how long it takes a body to lose a degree of heat, and all that stuff,” Drake said.
Mason frowned. “It couldn’t have been midnight. She talked with me over the telephone.”
“That’s what I thought,” Drake said, “but I wasn’t in a position to do any arguing.”
Mason said, “I guess that’s it, Paul.”
“What?”