Anna, Dante Wentworth, and Seamus Callahan argue briefly over the shocking sight of Judd Dodge’s body wedged awkwardly over the toilet in Edith Gerhardt’s compartment bathroom. Anna ignores the bickering, checks Judd’s eyes and neck for signs of life, and confirms he is dead. Although his skin is still warm, there is no pulse, indicating a recent death but not how recent.

Anna searches Judd’s pockets and finds his pocket watch. Inside the rim she sees crystalline residue that smells like rat poison, the same odor previously detected in Judd’s martini glass and the galley’s poison box. She concludes Judd used the watch to seed his drink with poison as part of a staged scene.

To test how the fake poisoning worked, Anna examines Judd’s mouth and extracts a thin, pink-tinted shard of plastic that she identifies as Saran wrap. She explains how Judd could have hidden small portions of vinegar, baking soda, and red food coloring in separate plastic-wrap packets and bitten them in sequence to create blood-tinged foam, while separately dosing his martini with rat poison from the watch to authenticate the illusion.

Anna and the others then look for the real cause of death. She spots a crimson patch on Judd’s neck below the ear and determines he was strangled. Based on warmth and the known timeline—especially Reggie Davis’s stabbing earlier—Anna estimates Judd died within the last half hour, though she admits uncertainty.

This finding forces Anna to reassess the night’s sequence. While Judd plausibly could have killed Edith while pretending to be dead, the logistics and condition of Judd’s clean, dry clothes make Herb Pulaski’s throat-slashing and snowy escape less credible as Judd’s work. Given the ambiguity around Judd’s time of death, he may have been killed before Herb died, which would exonerate Judd for that murder and imply another perpetrator.

Anna concludes that Judd had an accomplice who knew he was alive and later murdered him by strangulation. She stumbles into the corridor, realizing there must be a second killer active on the train. Anna believes she has identified who that person is, though she does not name them aloud.