He grabbed the brass handle, shouted, “Door,” and somebody in an adjoining room buzzed it open. He did not look back, just flung the door wide and let me catch it on my forearm before it slammed shut again.

The department’s file room was virtually a warehouse, with rows of adjustable shelves that looked as if they had been built from an erector set. There was a little desk just inside the door, but nobody was at it. “Clancy!” the chief bellowed, and an ancient cop in a faded uniform that looked nearly as old as he scuttled out from the stacks.

“Right here, Chief.”

Cello DiMasi flung a thumb in my direction, again without looking at me. “This here’s Assistant D.A. Becket. He wants to look at what we got on the Telford case.”

The old man turned to me with an expression of concern. Worry, maybe. Possibly fear. “The Telford case, sure. Right this way.” He made another turn and hurried down one aisle with his shoulders curled forward and his hands splayed in front of him as if he were sweeping for mines. We followed, me first and then the chief, and Clancy took us all the way to the end of the aisle, where he began scanning the shelves, looking over once or twice at the chief as if to tell him not to get excited, the files were right here somewhere.

Like Clancy, I looked at the chief. Unlike with Clancy, the chief did not look back at me. He was still seething over whatever insult he thought I had dealt him. I was in the process of replaying our conversation in my head when Clancy let out a cry of relief and hauled two cardboard boxes from the back of a shelf, where they had been obscured by a whole series of other files. The boxes had the name Telford written on them in black Magic Marker, and the old man dropped them onto the floor in triumph.

The chief looked down, poked them with the rounded toe of his shiny black shoe, and said, “Lemme know if you find anything us dumb cops overlooked.” Then he spun around and left me to do my own digging.

Once the chief was gone, Clancy began fawning over me. He had a nice desk and chair for me, he said. He could bring the boxes to me. He offered me coffee, claimed he had just made a fresh pot. I picked up one of the boxes, nodded to him to pick up the other, and told him all I needed was his desk and chair.

I HAD COME TO the police station with the idea that it was going to take me hours to go through the evidence. It took forty minutes. Then I went back and went through it again, sure that I had missed something.

The contents of one box consisted almost entirely of photographs, pictures of a blonde girl in a sleeveless summer dress sprawled on her stomach under a maple tree just to the side of a meticulously groomed fairway; close-ups of the back of her head, looking not so much crushed as carved open like a melon; close-ups of her face after she had been rolled onto her back, her eyes closed, her features expressionless, somehow unreal, as if she were not a person at all but a model of one. There were scores of shots from the autopsy, including about a dozen of her naked body lying on a metal table, but I chose not to look at them. I was interested mostly in the way she appeared on the golf course.

The dress was of no particular quality that I could discern. It was blue, patterned with what appeared to be little red roselike figures. She wore no shoes and of course no stockings. The photos at the scene did not show whether she was wearing underwear, but in the second box there was a sealed clear plastic bag with a pair of pink-and-white striped bikini briefs. The autopsy report, also in the other box, said she was wearing the briefs but no bra. I went back and looked at the pictures of her lying supine on the coroner’s table. It was hard to tell from that position, but she did not appear to be a woman who could regularly go braless without attracting considerable attention.

I did not need to speculate about her legs. Her knees, just below the kneecaps, showed grass stains.

A good-looking girl, twenty years old, had either been on her knees voluntarily or had been dragged across a lawn. I studied the pictures yet again. There were none of the golf course itself. It was depicted only as the location of the body. One shot was taken from the road, looking through one set of trees, across the fairway to a thicker copse where Heidi’s body lay. Another was taken from just beyond the first set of trees, on the fairway side, showing about one hundred feet of grass. Another was taken at fifty feet from the body, yet another at twenty-five, and then several at ten feet. I could not tell from any of them if there was a drag path.

I had to assume there wasn’t. Surely, if there was evidence that she had been dragged, the police would have recorded it.

What the photos did show was that there had been plenty of foot traffic in the dew-laden grass. I pulled out the police report and read that at 5:45 a.m. on Tuesday, May 26, 1999, a groundskeeper named Rinaldo DaSilva had discovered the body on the sixteenth fairway. He had been driving a golf cart pulling a fantail rake behind it when he had first noticed what he described as “a pile of blue.” He had thought, for some reason, that it was a pool cover that had blown onto the course from somebody’s home and so he had not gone to it right away. When he did realize what it was, he panicked. He got out of his cart and ran to her side but did not touch her, thinking that it would be wrong, inappropriate, something he shouldn’t do. Instead, he stood over, shouting down to her, “Lady! Lady, are you all right? Lady, wake up!” Then he ran to the street, thinking he might see somebody, some friend of hers, somebody who could help him. He admitted he was not thinking very clearly.

He ran back to her, forced himself to kneel down, to part her hair. He had seen that her hair and neck and back of her dress were bloody, but he hadn’t seen where the blood had come from until he separated the tangle of hair and saw what he thought was her brain. Then, he said, he fell over, fell backward onto his hands and did a crab-walk to try to get away from her. He thought he went about fifteen feet before he collapsed. Then he got to his feet and ran to the street again, shouting for help as loud as he could.

A man named Lowell Prentice came out of his house in his bathrobe, demanding to know what was going on. Rinaldo DaSilva pointed to the trees. Prentice followed Rinaldo back to the body, apparently hobbling with considerable difficulty because of some knee condition that required him practically to drag one foot behind him. Once there, he didn’t know what to do, either. The two of them seemed to accomplish little more than trampling whatever evidence might have existed.

According to the medical examiner, Dr. Rajit Pardeep, Heidi had died from intracraneal and intercerebral bleeding after having been struck on the back of the skull by a narrow, dull-bladed metal object. Given the fact that she had been found on a golf course, Dr. Pardeep surmised she had been struck by a golf club. He found no semen in her body cavities, no evidence of sexual molestation. Her stomach contents were thirty-three percent liquid, which he attributed to alcohol, and her blood alcohol level was .12, enough to be intoxicated but not falling-down drunk.

The investigation report was prepared by Detective Howard Landry. I knew him only by name. He worked serious crimes and I didn’t. His presence on the case meant that, at least initially, nobody was trying to sweep this under the rug.

May 26, 1999, he had been called at home at 6:10 a.m. and arrived at the scene at 6:42. Other officers as well as EMTs from the fire department were present, and Heidi Telford had already been pronounced dead. Barnstable police had put up yellow tape to seal off the area, but Landry confirmed my suspicion that irreparable damage had been done in terms of failing to preserve evidence of footsteps or drag paths. He could find no blood spatters on or around the maple tree beneath which the body was found.