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riddance to him. It had saved her the trouble of forcing him out.
    She parked her Explorer at the edge of the beach at Mason Point, slipped out of her sneakers and replaced them with the pair of black waterproof boots that she always kept in the trunk. She was supposed to be off duty, but had learned quickly that no chief of police in a small community is ever really off duty. Anyway, this was different. It wasn’t every day that a body washed up on the shores of her town.
    Two uniformed officers were already waiting for her by the water’s edge, along with Dan Rainey, who lived close to the beach and had first seen the body floating in the surf. The officers were both women, and had been hired on Bloom’s watch. Their employment had led, not coincidentally, to a couple of further male retirements and resignations from the department, to go along with those of Lange and Foster, as their aging cronies negotiated settlements with the town and headed off into the sunset. The blatancy of it had irritated Bloom, but she shared her feelings only with her husband. He was an architect with a sideline in designing boats, and exuded the calm of a Buddha, helped by the occasional toke. Sometimes she threatened to arrest him for it, which he found highly amusing. Still, the resulting purge of the department’s deadwood had allowed her to redress the previous gender imbalance (female: 0 percent/ male: 100 percent) while still holding on to a couple of senior male officers who were secretly glad to see the back of Lange, if only because it would enable them to work out their twenty away from his martinet gaze.
    Mary Preston was the younger of the two officers on the beach. She was a big woman in her late twenties, and Bloom wasn’t sure that she would have passed the physical fitness test over in Bangor, which required female recruits of her age to be able to do fifteen push-ups without stopping, thirty-two sit-ups in one minute, and run one and a half miles in fifteen minutes. On the other hand, she was smart, intimidating, loyal, and very, very funny. When Bloom had gently raised the issue of her weight during the interview process, Preston informed her that she had no intention of letting a ‘perp’ – and that was the word she used – get so far away from her that fifteen minutes of jogging would be required to capture him. If speed over distance did become an issue, she said, she’d run him down in her car. If she didn’t have a car, she’d throw her flashlight at him.
    If that failed, she’d just shoot him.
    Bloom hired her on the spot.
    The second officer was Caroline Stynes, who had twelve years under her belt as a sergeant up in Presque Isle. She was a decade older than Preston, and Bloom was grooming her to become deputy chief, just as soon as she could convince the town’s human resources department to come up with an appropriate salary. For now, Stynes had brought her rank with her to Boreas, and was Bloom’s de facto second-in-command.
    ‘What have we got?’ Bloom asked.
    ‘Male,’ said Stynes. ‘Could be in his forties, but it’s hard to say.’
    The body lay facedown on the sand, the retreating tide still lapping at its feet. He looked like he hadn’t been in the sea for too long, although immersion in the cold, deep salt water of the North Atlantic would have inhibited putrefaction for a time. His body also wouldn’t have started to rise until the gases inside decreased its specific gravity, creating enough buoyancy for it to reach the surface and float. In addition, the man was wearing a heavy jacket and a sweater, which would have kept him under the water for longer, even allowing for the action of the gases.
    Bloom pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and gently pushed his hair away from his face. Fish and crustaceans had already been nibbling on the soft tissue, and one eye was gone. She could see some damage to his skull, although it would take an autopsy to determine if it was ante-or