Her bones had mostly come apart during the retrieval operation, and trying to lay them out in the correct anatomical order had taken Mark an entire weekend. He wasn’t sure he got all the small phalanges of the fingers exactly right, and everything was still discolored brown. The forensics pathologist he’d talked to in New York had told him to do the best he could and not clean the specimen until their own cold-case specialist could view the remains. Consequently, the piecemeal skeleton and remaining strands of tissue had the appearance of something dug up from antiquity.

“Race you to the raft, Mark!”

A flash of golden skin parted the water, and the splash sparkled white in the sun. He plunged after her, laughing with delight as he frantically swam through her wake, then drew alongside, managing to touch the bobbing platform first.

Only now did he realize she had let him win.

“So what do you have?” Everett asked, quickly removing his overcoat and snapping on a pair of latex gloves he took from a box on the counter.

“First, what we didn’t find. No jewelry, no buttons, no belt buckle, and not so much as a shred of clothing, some of which we figure should have survived in all that cold mud, so we assume she was stripped before going in the water…”

As he spoke, Mark envisioned her plunging through the murk, sleek and white as a taper, her strawberry blond hair streaming out behind her.

“… nor were there any distinctive marks on the anchor and chain used to weight her down. What we do have are the remains you see before you, the obvious feature being the skull fracture.” Mark retrieved a pen from his jacket pocket and used it to indicate a three-inch crack that cut across her right temple. Filled with debris, it stood out like a leech on the subtler corrugated markings where the various bony plates in the cranium joined together. “Whoever hit her knew exactly the spot,” he continued. “The point of impact measured two finger widths above the zygomatic arch and a thumb width behind the frontal process of the zygomatic bone itself. That’s directly over the middle meningeal artery.” He picked up the skull, turned it over, and held it so the detective could look inside the cranial vault through the foramen magnum, the large opening through which the spine had been connected to the brain.

The interior emitted a whiff of rot.

Everett screwed up his nose and jerked his head away.

“See how there are bony splinters pressed inward,” Mark continued, shoving the specimen back in front of his eyes. He’d be damned if he’d let this worn-out little man evade a single detail of what had been done to Kelly. The trick to getting the best out of cops was the same as with doctors – make them care. “They probably tore the vessel, setting off a massive hemorrhage. Pray to God she was still unconscious going in the water.”

“Still?”

“Trauma that tears the meningeal artery causes a bleed between the lining of the brain and the skull. Sometimes victims stay unconscious until they die. Sometimes they wake up and are lucid for a while. There’s a chance she was sent to the bottom awake and aware.”

“My God,” Dan said.

Even Everett looked taken aback. He rotated his neck as if it needed loosening up. “That’s it?”

“There’s nothing else to look at.”

“So it’s still a cold case.” The detective pulled off his gloves.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’d love to spend a couple of weeks up here and work the evidence with you. Hell, I’m in love with your town, even though I can’t see it. It’s everything New York’s not, quiet, clean, and slow. Bet the fishing’s great. Trouble is, you don’t have any new evidence to work, and I got recent caseloads up the wazoo back home that do.”

“But it’s murder.”

Everett’s thin shoulders slumped, and he let out a rattling sigh. “It’s a body, what’s left of it, with a skull fracture. That anchor, chain, and padlock your retrieval team pulled up? We checked them out already. Virtually untraceable, they’re so common. Otherwise, there’s not a thing to point us where we haven’t already been. NYPD investigated the hell out of her disappearance twenty-seven years ago, the same as if she’d been a murder case. Not only did every lead come up empty – especially anything having to do with our prime suspect back then, her husband – but the PIs hired by the girl’s parents couldn’t find anything either. Factor in all the clout old man Braden still has in New York City, no one’s willing to put his son through a first-degree shit-ride again without a damn solid reason.”

To this point, Mark had considered the detective’s visit as simply the necessary first step in the NYPD resuming the hunt for Kelly’s murderer. That they’d try to dump it never occurred to him. “That sucks!”

“You bet.”

“And what would it take to reopen the case? I can’t just let it go.”

Everett shrugged and began pulling on his overcoat. “Well, say, you find a lead on the mystery man she met up with. We’d be on him in a New York minute.”

“I find a lead?”

“You want more done, do it yourself, Doc. You and the sheriff here.” He picked up his briefcase, snapped it open, and took out a pair of files, each the size of the Manhattan phone book. “I made copies of our records on the case, the basic stuff. Your body, your jurisdiction, guys. Sorry, but it’s the best I can offer.” He jammed the two tomes of paper into Mark’s chest and walked out the door.

“Jesus, what an asshole,” muttered Dan, and hurried after him.

Mark remained where he was, too astonished by the kiss-off to say anything. A slam echoed down the corridor, and once again he found himself alone with Kelly.

A half hour later he looked up from leafing through the material Everett had left, startled to see Dan standing at the door watching him. “Christ, I didn’t hear you return.”

“You were pretty engrossed in your reading. Find anything?”

“No. It’ll take forever to go through this stuff.” Mark slammed the files closed. “Can you believe that guy, laying the whole thing on us?”

Dan walked over and flipped one of the dossiers open again. Scanning the front page, he said, “Actually, it kind of makes sense.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know what cracks cold cases?”

“What?”

He nudged the folder he’d been looking at back toward Mark. “One guy who can’t get it out of his head. I’d say that’s you, buddy.”

5:00 P.M.

Geriatrics Wing,

New York City Hospital

Dr. Bessie McDonald didn’t like seeing the sun go down. The gathering blackness reminded her too much of her own end of days, and her breathing got worse at night.

She felt depressed, stuck in her hospital room. At least the nurses had allowed her more than the usual personal effects to help make it easier. She had a dozen framed photographs – a black-and-white of Fred in his uniform, smiling before he went off to Korea to be slaughtered and leave her a widow; color snaps of her son, Fred Junior; portraits of her three young grandsons, all grinning at her with various front teeth missing. She’d also brought a set of figurines depicting a young woman doctor performing her daily functions: administering to a newborn baby, listening to an old man’s chest, comforting a sick child. Though she never told anyone, the face on the porcelain statues was hers as a young woman, fired especially for her by a craftsman who had been her patient in the first years of her practice. She took nearly as much comfort looking at the figurines as at her family, not out of narcissism, but from pride at how she’d spent her life, from those early halcyon days up until the moment her own rendezvous with illness clipped her wings as a general practitioner.

She’d always been at risk of a stroke because of her crazy heart flying in and out of funny rhythms: a racing yet steady-as-a-jackhammer burst called PAT, or paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, when she was forty-three; then, in later years, atrial fibrillation, a chronic, wildly erratic tattoo. Whatever the beat, the muscle began to wear out, and eventually she slipped into congestive failure. Luckily, Melanie Collins saw her through it all. But she hadn’t suffered her first embolic event until four years ago at age sixty-six, when a blood clot formed in the fluttering upper chamber, broke off, and flew into her brain. Initially paralyzed on the right side, she’d been left with just her speech affected, again thanks to the precise diagnostic skills of Melanie and the quick use of clot busters – thrombolytic enzymes that break down the blockage before damage is done. Therapy got her back to talking so that no one would notice; however, at times, she had trouble finding the word she wanted.