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had passably comfortable chairs and cots. Only one of the cells had a sink and a toilet, as even the most pessimistic predictions of the men who had built this station house in 1923 did not foresee a time when more than one man too dangerous to be permitted access to the public washrooms would ever be kept in these cells at the same time. And indeed, they had been right. The cots had been added in the fifties, when the most common inmate was a drunk needing an airing out before being sent home to his wife. The predictable roster of overindulgers were still the most frequent guests in these cells. That is, when it wasn’t the officers themselves, catching fifteen minutes in the midst of a quiet shift.
    For their purposes, they dragged an unused desk into the cell and covered it with a tarp. The mannequin was in a bodybag, and had attracted its share of attention as it was brought from Tate and Calberson’s van into the station house. “It’s not what you think,” Hazel had said repeatedly, until everyone went back to their work. She hobbled into the cell on her cane. “Do you think we need Spere?”
    “Do you?” asked Wingate.
    “No,” she said, lowering herself carefully onto one of the cots. “Go get Cassie’s camera and you can take some snaps of this thing. And give her this.” She handed him her notebook. “Tell her to call the numbers Jellinek gave us for Bellocque and Paritas and get those two in. I want to know how a pair of Sunday fishermen managed to hook a mannequin weighted to the lakebed.”
    “Maybe they used flies,” said Wingate. “Should I get Pat Barlow back in?”
    “I want to see how their story jibes with hers before we talk to her again. Go on, get started.”
    Wingate left as Calberson and Tate put the bag on the desk and unzipped it. The opened bag emitted a stench of rotting vegetation and when they tipped the putty-coloured form out, runnels of grey lakewater ran over the side of the table and onto the floor. It was a female model, tinged in places with light blooms of new algae. It was headless and without hands or feet, her sex vaguely hinted at in the rise of two small, nipple-less breasts, and a smooth pubis. Hazel could imagine the staring, painted blue eyes, the blush on the cheeks, the dark black eyelashes. After they’d freed the mannequin from the bag, Calberson fished out the five two-pound weights that had held the hollow form to the lake bottom. “Someone wanted to make sure this thing stayed down there,” he said.
    “Or that it was easy to find,” said Hazel. Wingate returned with PC Jenner’s digital camera. “Get some close-ups of the extremities,” she said. “What there is of them.”
    Wingate started shooting. Whoever had put this thing into the lake had gone to the trouble of sawing off the missing parts rather than detaching them at the joints that were designed for easy mixing and matching. In fact, all five joints were still intact: the cuts had been made below them. There was a sixth joint at the waist, to pose the figure in some fetching position. That was why Barlow had seen the rear end rising out of the water. Tate and Calberson stood against the wall, watching Wingate make his pictures. He flipped it over onto its belly and photographed the smooth, featureless back.
    “What’s that?” asked Hazel. There was something printed right over the spot where her own back had broken down.
    Wingate leaned in. “The manufacturer’s name. Verity Forms, it says. And a serial number.”
    “Well, it’s something.”
    “I’ll look them up after I’m done making pictures,” said Wingate.
    “You going to ask them if they’re missing a mannequin?” Tate asked. “This is just someone’s idea of a prank. It’s a waste of time, and what’s more, it almost cost my partner his life.”
    “The boat drifted,” said Calberson. “Calm down already.”
    “This is bullshit,” said Tate, and he went out of the cell, slamming the door.
    “It’s