Lyle stopped him with a hand to his chest right in front of the Great Seal of New York. Mark sidled farther down the hall and stopped, clearly listening for anyone who might come their way.

“What is this?” Even the comparatively chilly entranceway was warm enough to make Russ’s glasses cloud over. He took them off. “You guys hitting me up for my lunch money?”

“Russ.” Lyle sounded dead serious. “I’m not telling you this as your second in command. I’m telling you this as a friend. You’re going to wind up in a boatload of trouble if you’re seen driving around town with Clare Fergusson.”

“She gave me a ride back into town after paying a condolence call on my mother. For chrissakes, what do you think is going on? My wife just died!”

Lyle thumped him in the chest. “That’s right. Your wife just died. And half the town has heard one sort of rumor or another about you and Reverend Fergusson.” Russ opened his mouth, outraged, but Lyle cut him off. “I don’t want to hear about how innocent it all is! If you don’t have any sense of self-preservation, at least you could think about the lady. What’re the folks who go to her church going to think of her if they see you holding hands and whispering sweet nothings before Linda’s even in the ground?”

Russ reared back. His hands clenched involuntarily. “You’re damn lucky you’re in uniform, MacAuley, because if we were on our own time, I’d be kicking your ass right now.”

“And I’m trying to save yours. What the hell took you so long? Your mom called, and I expected you a half hour ago.”

Through his anger, he felt a twinge of guilt. His men shouldn’t have to rely on his mother to tell them his whereabouts. “I went straight to the high school.”

“Alone?”

He paused.

“Oh, for-Don’t tell me Reverend Fergusson went with you.”

“I got the description and license number of a car that was sitting in my drive Sunday afternoon. No sign of anybody, but the kid who reported it may know more than he’s telling.”

“Did it even occur to you that sharing details about this case with her might not be a good idea?”

That stopped him. The hand-holding jibe pissed him off, but this was just bewildering. “Why not?”

“Because Clare Fergusson falls within the circle of possible suspects.”

“Clare?” He couldn’t help it, he laughed out loud. Replacing his glasses, he looked at Lyle. In focus, his deputy chief appeared even more upset. “I’m sorry,” Russ said. “You’re right. I can see where people might get the wrong idea seeing me and Clare together. Trust me, it won’t happen again anytime soon.” And God, wasn’t that a depressing thought? “You don’t need to worry about the case, either. We didn’t really discuss it. Just talked about our impressions of Quinn Tracey-he’s the kid who saw the car-and your theory of the case. Mostly it was, you know, grief stuff.” Lyle still looked skeptical. “She is a priest, you know.”

“I know, Chief. I know.”

From his post, Mark coughed and clomped around in an unsubtle way. Lyle gestured, and they both crossed to the hallway. Harlene was hustling toward them, her unhooked headpiece trailing wires behind her.

“There you are,” she said. She looked at the three of them skeptically. “You all right?” She flapped her hands. “Never mind. Dr. Dvorak just called. He has the preliminary autopsy results.”

An icy boulder rolled down Russ’s gullet and lodged there. “Okay,” he said. He nodded at Lyle. “Let’s go.”

Harlene goggled at him. “You some sort of masochist, or what?”

“Harlene-” Lyle warned.

Russ shook his head. He looked into Harlene’s round eyes and felt a surge of gratitude for all the people who cared for him. None of whom, of course, had the least bit of tact. “I need to do this,” he told her. “Whatever it takes to find her killer, I need to do it.”

“Damn fool,” she said under her breath.

“But I do think we ought to bring Mark,” he said to Lyle.

“Me?” Mark snapped to attention like a Labrador sighting a duck. He had never attended a briefing at the ME’s office.

“You. I gotta be realistic. I may not absorb everything, so an extra pair of ears will be helpful. Plus”-Russ shrugged-“you’re detective material. We got to get you out there, exposed to this stuff.”

“I’ll go get our coats,” Mark said, and bolted down the hall toward the squad room.

Lyle looked at him assessingly. “I guess you’re not completely lost to reason.”

Russ ran one hand through his hair. God, he felt old, old, old. “Don’t count on it,” he said.

Mark Durkee had met the Washington County medical examiner before. He wasn’t sure what made him uneasy in the man’s presence-the fact he spent his days elbow-deep in dead bodies, or the mad-scientist look he had perfected, thanks to an assault two summers before, which had left him with a white scar that twisted out of his short gray hair to bisect one eyebrow. He also had a permanent limp he treated with a silver-topped cane. Thumping his way down the mortuary hall toward them, his white coat flapping behind him, Dr. Dvorak looked like a figure straight out of one of the Stephen King novels Mark had devoured in his teens.

Dvorak raised his eyebrows when he saw the chief. Or rather, he raised the one that was still mobile, giving his face a satanically lopsided look. “Good lord. Are you completely lacking in good sense?” he said. “Are you sure you want to be part of this?”

The chief nodded.

“Idiot. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to.” Dvorak pivoted on his cane and limped back up the way he had come. The chief and the dep followed, so Mark went along, too, wondering as they moved slowly up the institutional, lino-and-fluorescent hall if they were going through the battered metal doors at its end. He wasn’t sure what was behind there, past the public rooms of the mortuary, and he desperately didn’t want to find out. Which, he knew, didn’t make any sense for a career cop. He had seen dead bodies before. Three. But the sight was endurable in the crime scene, with the blood and the violence attending. Maybe because the bodies didn’t seem like dead people there. They were evidence.

But laid out on a steel slab, with blue lips and black thread suturing up their cold skin… He shivered.

“Durkee?”

Mark snapped to. MacAuley was standing by one of the doorways, waiting for him. “You okay?” the deputy chief asked.

“Yes, sir,” Mark said, and he was, because he saw through the door that there was nothing in the room except the same sort of 1960s government-issue office furniture they had in the MKPD.

There were only two chairs facing Dr. Dvorak’s obsessively neat desk, so Mark took up a stance next to the door while the chief and MacAuley made themselves as comfortable as they could.

Dvorak sat. He picked up a manila file folder and squared it on the green baize blotter in front of him. “First thing,” he said. “I am not going to show you any pictures.”

The chief nodded.

“Second thing,” the pathologist said. “As is my custom in the case of a homicide, I moved directly from the recorded autopsy to the preliminary report. Therefore, I won’t be ready to release the body until tomorrow at the earliest.”

He meant, Mark realized, that he had to finish putting the pieces that had been Mrs. Van Alstyne back together.

The ME splayed his fingers across his scarred forehead. His nails were very clean and very blunt. “I have to tell you,” he said, “this has been the most disturbing autopsy I’ve done since I started in this position.” He lowered his hand and looked at the chief. “The bulk of my work is as a pathologist. If I have more than two suspicious deaths a year, it’s a banner event. That’s what I wanted when I came here. Peaceful work in a quiet county. I never really stopped to think that sooner or later I’d be autopsing,” his voice broke sharply, “someone I know.” He looked at the chief. His pale eyes were wet.