In Herb Pulaski’s compartment, Herb nervously smoked while Anna Matheson and Agent Reginald “Reggie” Davis questioned him as the first subject in their post-murder interrogations. He noted that Edith Gerhardt’s body had just been carried next door and reflected bitterly that everyone but Kenneth Wentworth had been tricked onto the train.

Agent Davis asked for Herb’s whereabouts during the past hour. Herb claimed he stayed in his room the entire time after Judd Dodge’s death. Anna and Davis probed whether Herb anticipated another killing; Herb admitted only to a pervasive bad feeling born of panic.

When asked about his feelings toward Judd and Edith, Herb said he had no real animosity, describing Judd as condescending but smart and admitting he barely knew Edith. Anna then pressed about his role in the Matheson family tragedy, forcing Herb to explain his motive for joining the earlier conspiracy: mounting gambling debts that escalated from small bets to dangerous loans, culminating in his acceptance of the scheme after Judd revealed the faulty engine design.

Distracted by fear and the image of two corpses on the car, Herb struggled to focus on Davis’s questions. He insisted he heard no one else in the car after seeing Anna. Herb then spiraled into panic, reasoning that the killer seemed to be moving room by room—Judd in the last compartment, then Edith in the second-to-last—making him fear he was next.

Herb’s anxiety intensified into chest-tightening dread as he asked if he would die that night. Anna, disgusted yet resolute, said she wanted him alive until they reached Chicago in under seven hours and instructed him to keep his door locked, promising hourly checks by herself, Davis, or Seamus Callahan.

After Anna and Davis departed, Herb threw open his window into the snowstorm and gulped freezing air, consumed by regret and the thought that he should have jumped when he had the chance.