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broken?”
    “Nope.”
    “Find any fibers? Material under her nails?”
    Pete Olson had bagged her hands at the scene, and they’d wrapped her in a sheet before loading her into the ambulance to preserve any trace evidence. Of course, since she had been in the lake, the odds of them finding anything useful were slim.
    “Fingernails looked clean, but I’ll send samples of everything to the crime lab. In fact, I could use a gofer.”
    Wisconsin had three crime labs, the closest in Madison. But as with everything else, budgets were tight. It was hard to say how large a back log they were dealing with or just when Val might see reports on what they found.
    “I’ll send my newest officer. As long as you promise not to scare her away.”
    “Oh, I’d never do that, sugar lips.”
    “Seriously, be polite.”
    He held up a hand. “I swear.”
    She focused back on the gurney. “You have photos?”
    “Yep. But this you should see in person.” He removed the evidence sheet, uncovering Kelly’s head and naked shoulders. Like at the lake, her skin was the color of freezer burned chicken, her once blue eyes colorless.
    “Hold on.” Harlan pulled on a new pair of gloves and gently probed along the top of her cheekbone with an index finger. Grunting as if in answer to a question posed by his own thoughts, he picked up a syringe from the tray of instruments. “Still frozen, but she’s thawed enough now to take fluid. This’ll take just a sec.”
    Realizing what he was about to do, Val glanced toward the ceiling.
    “What you looking at? You got to see this.”
    Swallowing into a tight throat, she forced her eyes to return to Kelly’s face.
    Harlan pushed the upper and lower lids of one eye back to more clearly reveal a dull, ghostly gray eye. He held the syringe in his other hand, the needle poised only centimeters away. “See that?”
    She leaned forward. “See what?”
    “Subconjunctival hemorrhage. The capillaries in the eyes. They’re broken.”
    “A sign of strangulation.”
    “Could be. Likely just from struggling to breathe before she drowned. No bruising at the throat. No sign of any other injuries. Maybe I’ll find more when I cut her open.” Before she could look away, he plunged the needle into Kelly’s eye and drew fluid into the syringe. “Yup, looks like she’s thawing nicely.”
    Val’s face felt hot, her head light. She breathed through her mouth to keep the smells from adding to her misery.
    On television, cops were so tough, never flinching at the sights and smells of death and the more than distasteful procedures in the morgue. She’d known real cops like that, but she’d never been one of them. She’d always had to work hard just to keep it together.
    “Uh, let me know what you find.” Monica bolted out of the autopsy suite. The bathroom door down the hall slammed shut.
    Val hoped she wouldn’t have to join her. “The eyes, is that what you wanted me to see, Harlan?”
    Having noted and logged his sample, Harlan returned to the gurney. He peeled back the sheet, exposing Kelly’s bare body. “There’s also this.”
    He moved his hand over her belly and pointed to the thin, red line stretching like a smile above Kelly’s trimmed strip of pubic hair.
    “Oh my God,” Val heard herself say. “She had a C-section.”
    Harlan nodded. “Looks like our girl here was somebody’s mommy.”

Chapter
Six
    “Y ou have to, Val.” Monica stared her down over evidence files that had failed to yield anything they hadn’t seen before.
    Val stifled a yawn. Except for a short dinner break, she and Monica had been holed up in her office since leaving the morgue, and in all those hours, they’d gotten exactly nowhere on their quest to identify Jane Doe and tie her death to Hess. A glance at her watch showed almost three in the morning.
    Jeff Schneider, with Olson’s help, had tracked down a male cousin on Kelly’s mother’s side who’d supplied them with a list of family members.