After dropping the file into a folder on the server, Serenity swiveled in her chair and got up to leave. She decided she’d head across town to the Sheriff’s Office to find out what she could. More than anything, she hated being ignored.

What did it take to get a decent story around Port Orchard, anyway? She asked herself.

Later, the admonition “be careful for what you wish for” would come to mind and haunt her dreams.

September 19, 10:15 a.m.

Port Orchard

The house at 704 Sidney Avenue had a history both mundane and macabre. It was a place that passersby and drivers skirted past, disinterested. Certainly, in its eight decades of existence it played out a thousand family dramas and joys. Most places that old have. Babies were born. Kids went to school. Teens went to the proms. Memories were made.

All of the things that make a house a living thing had transpired there.

Yet, this place was a little different. There was a touch of strangeness and darkness about the house as well.

One time in the 1990s, a woman who stopped by the house and spoke to the present occupants told a tale of her mother’s suffering with cancer.

“Dad couldn’t stand her constant crying all night,” said the visitor, who had once lived there. “So we set her up in a tent in the front yard. Dad put her out there so he could get some sleep. Seems a little cruel now when I think of it. But back then, it was a good solution.”

Not surprisingly, others who lived there reported that the house with an obscuring tree that had been lovingly planted by the first owners had a weird, sad vibe. Most who felt it did so only after learning that the place was the final stopping point for the dead of Kitsap County.

The house adjacent to the Sheriff’s Office back parking lot was the Kitsap County Morgue. It is doubtful that any other morgue in America was quite as homey.

The coroner’s offices were upstairs in what had been a dining room, living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen with a battered blue linoleum floor. Throughout the house, with its coved ceilings, pale gray paint, and thick-cut moldings, were the remnants of the dead. The staff stored formaldehyde-soaked tidbits of people in plastic bags set in large plastic tubs like the ones families use to store Christmas decorations. A built-in nook held teeth and a floating finger in small jars. Each body part was a clue to the unthinkable things that people did to each other. Despite the accoutrements of death, the upstairs was a staid, quiet office. Phones were answered, mail sorted, budgets balanced. If things were a little disordered, it was because the space was so small.

And body parts took up a lot of space.

Downstairs, however, was where the work that leaves a Rorschach pattern in crimson on a pristine white lab coat was done every time a stiff rolled in on a gurney. Early in the morning after the Little Clam Bay body was found, forensic pathologist Birdy Waterman put on her scrubs in the small dressing area in the converted garage that was a most unlikely autopsy suite. She checked the body logbook on a table next to a chiller that held six bodies at the time. It had only been full once or twice in the county’s history. While a couple of hundred bodies were autopsied every year, they were dispatched to funeral homes-mostly for cremation-within twenty-four hours of their arrival on Sidney Avenue.

“Move ’em in and move ’em out” was a phrase favored by the county coroner, an affable fellow named Kent Stewart who’d been elected to the position for a dozen years. He was more than an elected glad-hander. He was also a skilled manager of an ever-shrinking budget. The day before the dead body from Little Clam Bay had come in, Kent purchased four new office chairs from Boeing’s surplus store south of Seattle. The total cost was $28.

If Kent Stewart was the “face” of the coroner’s office, Birdy Waterman, a forensic pathologist, was the chief cook and bottle washer. Her hands were on everything. That was fine too. Kent only occasionally came downstairs to see what was happening in the morgue-mostly in the summer, when a decomposing body sent a stench up through the floorboards.

“Downstairs is your domain,” he said time after time. “Call me if you need me.”

With the exception of days that started with an autopsy, Kendall Stark never wore jeans to work. That morning as Steven organized Cody’s things for school, she packed an overnight bag. She moved around their bedroom, silently, gathering up a pair of slacks and sweater that she could wear while Dr. Waterman completed her examination.

Steven emerged from the bathroom and looked at the bag she’d filled.

“I was going to tell you to have a nice day,” he said, thinking better of it.

She pressed her lips into a slight smile. It was meant to acknowledge his support.

“I could barely sleep last night,” she said. “All I could think about was that dead young woman.”

“I know,” he said. He stepped closer and looked into her eyes as he held her hands.

“That’s what makes you good at your job, Kendall. You give a shit. Not everyone does. Some people sleepwalk through their lives, never really noticing why they’re here.”

She knew he was right, but she also wondered if he was talking about his own work. He’d been down about it, telling her not long ago that he “hadn’t dreamed of this life, this job” when he was a little boy. She’d tried to support him by reminding him that he was so good at selling ads.

“A trained chimp with half a personality could do what I do,” he’d shot back. His demeanor was slightly sardonic, but not so much that Kendall could be sure just how he really felt. She was left to wonder. When Steven talked about his disappointments in life, was he talking about her? About Cody?

She picked up her overnight bag.

“When I think of why I’m here,” she said, “I know it’s to help people, to bring the lost back home.”

Steven kissed her and playfully touched her hair. “You’ll find out what happened to the girl,” he said.

She didn’t say how she felt about Celesta Delgado and how she’d failed to find her killer. Mason and Kitsap counties postured over who owned the case: the jurisdiction in which she had gone missing or the one where her body was found. She didn’t tell Steven that she’d had an encounter with Tulio Pena at the Albertsons supermarket on Mile Hill and how he’d accused her of not caring, of giving up.

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “See you tonight.”

September 21, 9:30 a.m.

Port Orchard

Birdy Waterman looked up as the frosted-glass door swung open.

“Morning, Detective,” she said, as Kendall let herself inside.

“Sorry I’m late,” Kendall said taking off her jacket and hanging it on a hook near the logbook.

“You’re not late. Just in time, in fact.” Birdy rolled on a pair of gloves. She looked at the overnight bag. “Oh, goody. Why didn’t you tell me we were having another sleepover?”

Kendall smiled back. “A surprise,” she said.

“Where’s Anderson?”

“Good question, Doctor. He said he might be late, so I waited for him at the office. Never showed up.”

Kendall went into the small dressing room and put on a set of scrubs, emerging a few moments later to ask the question that had haunted her after seeing the body.

“What happened to her face?”

She stopped a few paces behind the pathologist as Birdy unlatched the enormous refrigerator and rolled out a sheet-covered corpse to a space on the far side of the room.

“The catchall is ‘animal activity,’ and I suspect I’ll be able to pin it to a seal. There are some teeth marks where the nose was excised.”