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stainless-steel table with a drain at its center and a bucket underneath occupied the middle of the floor. Suspended from the ceiling was a large OR lamp, and around the walls stood big yellow vats connected by beige tubing to shiny silver probes that looked like giant needles. Glass jars containing various colored fluids lined the counters, and two metal cabinets filled with stainless-steel instruments were against the walls. The aroma of formaldehyde picked at the back of his nostrils like a swarm of ants. “Better breathe through your mouth, gentlemen,” he warned, crossing over to what looked like a built-in filing cabinet with half a dozen giant drawers. He reached for the third handle down, and pulled out what was left of Kelly McShane.
    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