Lee Wier is one of my forensic pathologists, and she knows what she’s doing because I trained her.

“Well that’s turned into quite the cluster F.”

I have a bad feeling Georgia’s right about that. Molly Hinders is Investigator Barclay’s case, and Marino needs to intervene.

“That poor lady couldn’t have worse luck. Now everybody’s drunk and fighting while she’s all by her lonesome in a damn cooler,” Georgia is telling me as I keep thinking about what Dr. Wier said as she was going over the case during staff meeting several mornings ago.

When Molly Hinders’s body was found it was near a plugged-in stereo speaker that had fallen from its mount and was on the wet grass. It was the only explanation for how she could have been electrocuted in her backyard as she watered her plants with a hose. But it’s really never made sense to me that a speaker circuit could kill anyone.

HER SCALP AND HAIR were burned from coming into contact with the electrical source that killed her.

This was the early evening of the Labor Day holiday, and she’d returned home from kayaking on the Charles River. She removed her kayak from her car’s rooftop rack, dragged it into the backyard, then entered the house and poured herself a glass of wine. Still in her bathing suit, she went out to water the backyard, where there’s a stereo system, a wrought-iron table and chairs, and a barbecue under a partially covered pergola overgrown with vines.

When the police arrived the stereo system had no power because the ground-fault circuit interrupter—similar to a breaker—had been tripped. That alone should have prevented her from being shocked, much less killed. For some reason it didn’t, and I’ve found this puzzling from the start. But the case didn’t grab my attention then the way it does now. Molly Hinders is reminding me too much of Elisa Vandersteel and General Briggs.

“Please explain why Molly Hinders is still here,” I ask again.

“From what I gather,” Georgia says, “her family has money, and she and her estranged husband weren’t divorced yet. So he’s fighting over who’s claiming the body. They’re fighting over everything because she was real young and there’s no will, no nothing, and then the kicker? They fired the first funeral home they picked, so we can’t exactly be releasing her to anyone yet anyway.”

“It’s just as well, fortuitous in fact, because there may be other problems,” I reply as I hear the sound of the elevator doors opening. “I don’t want her released until I say. I want to check on a few things,” I add as Bryce appears, and he’s changed his clothes since we talked by phone in the trailer what seems an eternity ago.