It still broke Lenhardt’s heart to think of the night he found Jessica crying in her bed because she thought this meant that her dad couldn’t come to Career Day anymore. She took things so hard, Jessica did. Our daughter has no small emotions, as Marcia liked to say, but she could laugh when she said it, whereas Lenhardt brooded on the fact.

Still, he believed that if Jessica were in a locked room with one dead girl and another who appeared to be well on her way to dead, she wouldn’t have lingered. She would have gotten to that door by any means possible, unlocked it, and gone down the hallway on her belly if she had to. His daughter was scrappy, more of a fighter than her older brother, truth be told. Jason was a dreamer, safe in a gauzy world of his own making. But even Jason would have the instinct to save himself.

So why had the other girl stayed? Did she think the shooter might have the wherewithal to come after her? It was a foolish notion, but if you had grown up on a steady diet of horror movies in which the killer kept getting up again and again, you might think it possible. Had she been hiding in the stall and emerged only after it was all over?

“Like I said, ninety percent of what I’m seeing and hearing matches up with the shooter being the girl in Shock Trauma,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t think anyone in this room is going to be happy with a ninety percent certainty if the case falls apart in court. The dead girl’s father is already busting our balls. Imagine what he’ll be like if we fuck this up.”

“I thought it was a given in homicide that the obvious solution is the obvious solution.” The colonel smirked at what he thought was a brilliant ploy, throwing Lenhardt’s oft-repeated words back at him.

“I never disdain the obvious,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t let myself get seduced by it either.”

“Is it too late for tulips?” Susannah Goode asked the funeral director.

“Probably,” said Stan Jasper. “And they’re not a flower we work with, normally.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. Still, if they were in season…She loved tulips.”

“Whatever you choose, I’d recommend a palette of white. White, or pale yellow, or pale pink. Very appropriate to one so young.”

“Yellow,” Dale Hartigan said. “Roses.” Susannah squeezed his hand. More correctly, she squeezed his fist, because Dale’s hands had been pretty much balled into fists for the last twenty-four hours, except when occupied by tasks that insisted on uncurled fingers. Driving. Eating, except he hadn’t been able to eat, no matter how others urged him. Drinking, which he had done, well into the night, after the last phone call to his father, who wanted to know what the chief had said. He should be hungover today, yet he had never gotten drunk, much less achieved the total numbness he was going for. It was as if he had cried the liquor out before it could reach his blood.

“We work with a florist whose roses are exquisite.”

“Yellow roses are often quite bright,” Susannah pointed out. “Not pastel.”

“Oh, no, the ones we use are very, very light in hue.”

Dale had a weary moment of insight: He was being bilked. Well, not bilked, exactly, but the unctuous funeral director had sized him up nicely: Dale Hartigan, a well-fixed man who would spare no expense in burying his daughter, a businessman who would have no stomach for this negotiation. One man’s tragedy was another man’s workaday life, pure and simple. Stan might have been Dale, pricing out the electrical work on his latest project or girding for battle with the historic review board. Kat’s death was just a job to so many people-the police, the assistant state’s attorney, the medical examiner.

Then again, it could be argued that someone such as Stan, who worked in an industry that few found desirable, was entitled to charge a premium. Dale had thought the funeral business might have changed, that it would be more like that television show, with lots of loquacious, quirky types whose own dramas could distract the bereaved from their problems. But it was still pretty much The Loved One-essential yet vaguely suspect, like aluminum siding.

The interesting aspect about the funeral business, from a businessman’s standpoint, was that it didn’t have to chase its customers when they headed out to the suburbs. Other merchants needed to go where the customers were, but Baltimore ’s mortuaries had stayed in place for generations, confident that their customers would come to them when the time was right. Who ya gonna call? Oh, shit, Dale was totally losing it, quoting Ghostbusters in his head, sitting like a bump in a funeral home while his girlfriend planned his daughter’s funeral. “Yellow roses” had been his only real input so far. Yellow roses and his credit card. But then, he needed all his energy to keep from breaking down every five minutes. Once, when he was seventeen, Dale had been rear-ended in a pretty bad pileup on I- 83. A runaway semi had come tearing over a hill and confronted an unexpected backup. It had careered from one side to another, tearing open a Corolla, throwing a big boat of a Chevy into Dale’s father’s Pontiac. But he was young, his reflexes good, and he had braked before hitting the pickup in front of him. When he got out, he was astonished to see the damage to the cars, his and all those around him, more astonished that he hadn’t been injured. Yet, within a few hours, he was vaguely sore and achy.

That was how he felt now, times a thousand. He felt as if he had been broken into pieces and glued back together, like a little pitcher or vase. He looked the same, but if you poured anything into him, it would all leak out. He couldn’t hold a thought, much less a conversation.

“And the casket?” Stan Jasper prompted. Dale pointed blindly toward a photo in the glossy brochure before him, and Susannah nodded, signifying that his random choice was a suitable one.

Dale had helped to plan one funeral before, his mother’s eight years ago, but he found he had no memory of it. Even if he did, he couldn’t see how it would help get him through this. The cliché held: Burying a parent was part of the natural order. Burying a child was not. His only child. Now he got it, the old saying about the monarchy, an heir and a spare. The parents of only children had forgone the spare, which mattered not as an issue of primogeniture but as one of emotional safe harbor. If you had only one, you could lose everything.

Chloe had wanted a second child, but Dale could never see the point and had been secretly pleased when she couldn’t conceive again. Kat was so perfect that he worried he would favor her over any sibling who followed, even a son. Besides, Chloe’s interest in conceiving had been as flighty and temporary as all her plans-going back to school, becoming a certified yoga instructor, starting her own aromatherapy business. In the last instance, she had actually commissioned a sign, a hand-painted piece of wood proclaiming JUST GOOD SCENTS. The sign had cost four hundred dollars and was still, as far as Dale knew, tucked somewhere in the overstuffed garage, probably between Chloe’s kiln and Chloe’s skis.

“We aren’t as familiar with the, uh, liturgy as we should be,” Susannah was telling Stan Jasper. “And we don’t have a pastor, not really. But we would like the service to be, well, original. That is, it should be specific to Kat. Would it be appropriate, say, to use one of her favorite poems?”

“That would be utterly appropriate,” Stan said in his professionally assuring tones.

“ ‘ Dover Beach,’” Dale said.

“Sweetie?” Susannah squeezed his fist again.

“She was rehearsing a poem called ‘ Dover Beach,’ or a piece of it, for the graduation ceremony. ‘We are alone as if…’ something, something. I remember something about ignorant armies. She picked it out herself.”