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big surprise.’
    Something in her voice, a slight quaver, a hesitation, raised the hair on the back of my neck. ‘And?’
    â€˜Well, I have nearly a week coming.’
    â€˜Compensation for overtime?’
    â€˜Exactly. And what I thought I’d do was visit Jovianna. I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon.’
    I recoiled, literally, my head jerking back. Jovianna Littman was Adele’s sister, an unbearably competitive woman who used her several advanced degrees to lord it over her cop sibling. Ordinarily, Adele avoided Jovianna, who lived with her family in a gated community outside Baltimore, showing up only on the Jewish holy days of Passover and Yom Kippur. And then only for the sake of her parents, who lived nearby and whom she also disliked.
    â€˜How will you get there?’ I knew the question was inane before the words were out of my mouth.
    â€˜I decided to go by Amtrak, so I won’t have to put up with the security delays at the airport. The ride’s only six hours.’ She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Jovianna called me this evening and we just got to talking. My mother hasn’t been feeling well, which I think I told you, and I haven’t seen them since April. Plus, I know how you get when you catch a case like this. A couple of days from now, you’ll barely remember my name.’
    â€˜When are you coming back?’
    â€˜Maybe in a few days. If I can stand Jovianna even for that long. By the end of the week for sure.’
    There was nothing else to say, not unless I challenged Adele’s honesty. I wasn’t prepared to do that, although much of what she said rang false to my interrogator’s ear. So I told her to have a good time and got a hug before she turned out the light.
    For the next fifteen minutes, until she fell asleep, I laid quietly beside her. Then I rolled out of bed and went into the living room. Of necessity, Adele and I lived separate lives. She worked normal business hours, while I toiled from four until midnight. I wouldn’t have been ready for sleep, even on a normal day, but now my brain was spinning.
    I parked myself before the TV and tried to watch a movie, Ocean’s Eleven , but I couldn’t follow the convoluted plot. Somehow, I found my thoughts turning, not to Adele, but to the crime scene, to the flies and the body, the heat and the rain, to Clyde Kelly’s sad eyes and troubled conscience. Adele was running off to Maryland and there was nothing I could do about it. My Jane Doe was another matter. She was my responsibility. Only I could speak for her.
    Eventually, I took those thoughts back to my computer and reworked her likeness. I rotated her head back and forth, tilted her chin up, played with her expression. I imagined her happy and sad, fearful and angry. What would she do with her eyes, her mouth, her nose, her brow, her chin? Finally, after printing what amounted to a model’s portfolio, I settled on a three-quarters shot of her right profile, adjusting her eyes until she was looking at me with a sideways glance at once timid and sly. I had no reason to believe that the finished product would be any more effective than the first photo I printed. I really didn’t care.

FIVE
    I don’t like autopsies and I don’t ordinarily attend them. I’m not an overly squeamish man, so neither the sounds, the plops, crunches and squishes, or the incredibly foul odor, bother me all that much. It’s more a question of loss. You’d think that when an individual is inflicted with an injury sufficient to end her life, there’d be nothing more to take from her. But you’d be dead wrong. At autopsy, murder victims are reduced to meat on a table, to the bare mechanics. The various organs – the ones sill left, anyway – are examined, measured and weighed on a scale that might be found in any butcher shop. The stomach is squeezed of its contents, like icing from a pastry bag. The scalp