The body had been bobbing at the water’s edge, but was now ashore, a charred husk shaped like a mummy. Belafonte was talking to a distraught-looking elderly guy holding a Chihuahua to his breast. I figured he’d found the horror. The scene tech was a friend, Deb Clayton.

“This no place to leave a corpse, Carson,” Deb said. “The perp would have to cross the yard, set off a half-dozen yappy dogs. Seems more likely it was dumped upriver.”

I looked upstream and saw Dixie Highway bridging the canal, the traffic a line of fast metal. I heard the roar of heavy trucks and motorcycles. Belafonte saw where I was looking.

“Even at night, there’s a lot of traffic on Dixie. Better would be Ponce de Leon Boulevard, just past Dixie. Traffic’s lighter. But she could have been dumped anywhere above here.”

“Wonder what the flow rate is?” I said, studying the waves.

Belafonte bent to the water’s edge and found a sodden cigarette butt. She flipped it into the canal and watched it float lazily away.

“The water’s moving a quarter-mile an hour, give or take.”

“How’d you know that?”

“Bermuda’s a dot in the Atlantic. You get to know water. This close to the Bay there’d be a tide effect. Charts might help. I’ll make a few calls.”

“First we got a date at Missing Persons.”

The Missing Persons department at MDPD was overseen by Rod Figueroa. We’d had a rocky start a year ago, but he’d overcome some personal demons in the interim and was now a solid cop. Figueroa was tall and well-built, with long blond hair over an attractive but slightly lopsided face, the result of a jet-skiing accident when he was a teenager. He was also openly gay, another difference from last year.

I laid out our story. All we had on the body was an approximate height since, like Kylie Sandoval, the corpse was charred and covered with burned fabric. Figueroa opened a file and nodded as he flipped through pages.

“We had a woman in first thing this morning, Carson. Said her twenty-five-year-old daughter was supposed to pick up her kid a bit past four in the a.m.”

“Four a.m.?”

“The daughter does night stock at a Publix. When the daughter didn’t show up, Mama called the store. The night manager said the kid, Teresa Mailey, left on schedule. According to the mother, you could set your watch by the daughter.”

The mother lived in Allapattah, on a decent street in a blue-collar community. The house was small and well-kept, with a blue Kia in the flower-bordered drive beside several bags of fertilizer, a coiled hose and a wheelbarrow holding a rake and shovel. The yard was ablaze with blooms and I figured Mother Mailey was something of a gardener.

I knocked and a stout woman with graying hair and anxious eyes appeared at the door carrying a drowsy child. I’m poor at judging ages on kids, but it looked fairly fresh. We displayed IDs.

“The man at the police station …” Mailey said, confused. “He said nothing could be done for twenty-four hours.”

“Officer Belafonte and I are sort of a special team. We want to get right on these things.”

“Thank God. Please come in.”

We sat in a small but tidy living room with inexpensive furniture, K-Mart Colonial.

“Has this happened before?” I asked. “Teresa not showing up?”

She swallowed hard. “It was drugs. Teresa was in and out at all hours. Then she ran away three years ago. I-I didn’t know it at the time, but the man I lived with, I thought him a fine and honorable man, a hard worker, good Catholic ways, devoted to his m-mother …” She broke down.

“He abused Teresa,” I said.

“I worked two jobs, happy he could be there to care for Teresa. She ran away, got trapped into selling herself.”

I looked at Belafonte: prostitution. We had a link to Kylie Sandoval, small, perhaps circumstantial, but at least a path to walk.

“Then, seven months back, Teresa showed up at the door, pregnant, filthy, sick, lice in her hair. But I made her well. She got her GED and then a job at the Publix last year. They’re going to make her full time.”

Belafonte stepped up. “When Teresa was on the streets … do you know where, Ms Mailey?”

“She never speaks of it, though I think she traveled to Orlando.”

“How do you know that?”

“We never went up there until four months ago. We got low on gas. Teresa told me to turn off the highway at the next exit, that there was a Marathon station there.”

I put it in my notebook: Teresa – familiarity with Central FL? Orlando region?

Before we left I asked to borrow one of Teresa’s hairbrushes, assuring Ms Mailey it was just a precaution. She handed over a little pink thing with ample hair for a DNA test. We assured Ms Mailey we’d do all we could and started for the door. The kid awakened and his grandmother bobbed him in her arms, cooing and kissing his forehead.

“The child,” Belafonte asked quietly. “Bobby. Do you know who the father is?”

“It was a man Teresa spent very little time with. The boy knows nothing of his mother’s lost time, will never know. His road will be perfect.”

“The boy’s not a link to … Teresa’s difficult past?” I asked, taken with her love for the child.

“Every soul is a fresh soul. Bobby is clean. Please find my baby.”

It was a difficult trip to the hastily scheduled postmortem. Either the victim was Teresa Mailey, a terrible thing, or it was another young woman, an equally terrible thing. But we now knew Teresa’s situation: a comeback from drugs and prostitution, a child, a loving mother, a future, and both Belafonte and I were hoping someone else was dead, a disconcerting feeling to have.

I told Ava to start the dance without us, and she was in the belly cavity when we arrived, the medical and forensics techs having delicately removed the strips of cloth doused in accelerant and set ablaze.

Ava looked up and saw us. She flicked off the audio recording system so the transcriptionist wouldn’t have to wade through chit chat. The eyes went to Belafonte.

“Hello, Holly.”

I turned to Belafonte. “You two know each other?”

She cleared her throat. “I, uh, took your advice and …”

“Officer Belafonte was here at six thirty this morning,” Ava said. “She wanted to see a postmortem.”

“Six-freaking-thirty?” I said, looking at my temporary partner.

“I didn’t know when business commenced, and didn’t want to miss anything.”

“How’d it go?”

“To begin with my knees felt weak, the left, especially. But soon the procedure became extremely engaging.”

Ava set aside a kidney and turned to me. “I sent you additional forensics reports on the wrapping and accelerant. I take it you haven’t seen them yet?”

I shook my head. “Probably in my email.”

“It’s fascinating reading, Detective Ryder. The wrapping is strips of wool. The accelerant appears to be a mixture of naphtha and olive oil.”

“Wool? Naphtha? Olive oil?” I’d expected strips of bedsheet and gasoline.

“How’s that for an odd trinity?” Ava said.

“Does wool burn well?” Belafonte asked.

Ava shook her head. “It’s actually a poor choice. Difficult to light and burns slowly. But naphtha burns fast and hot.”

“And the olive oil?”

“Olive oil ignites at 435 degrees Centigrade. It would burn, but …”

“A can of motor oil would do a much better job,” I finished.

“Olive oil. It’s a riddle.”

Belafonte and I stayed until the end. Though fire had eradicated the fingertips, tissue DNA had been sent to the new “instant” DNA analyzer in Forensics. A forensics tech entered the suite as Ava was stitching the belly shut.

“We have a match from follicles on the brush. It’s Teresa Mailey.”

“Bloody hell,” Belafonte said, walking to the far end of the room.

“There’s more,” Ava whispered.

“What?”

“The lungs have heat damage, Carson.”

Mailey had also been alive when she’d been set ablaze. I saw an image of a Medieval witch burning, a woman tied to a post as flames devoured even her screams, and forced the sight from my mind.