And after I’d bought him a pint, too. The ungrateful little bollix. “Detective Kennedy needs to take himself a tad less seriously,” I said. “I don’t have to be on his little team to be interested. It’s an interesting case. And . . . well, I’d rather this didn’t get around, but if the victim’s who we think it is, I grew up with her.”

That put a sparkle in Cooper’s beady little eye, just like I’d known it would. “Indeed?”

I looked down and played reluctant, to tickle his curiosity. “Actually,” I said, examining my thumbnail, “for a while, when we were teenagers, I went out with her.”

That hooked him: his eyebrows hit his hairline, and the sparkle got brighter. If he hadn’t so obviously found himself the perfect job, I’d have been worried about what this guy got up to in his spare time. “So,” I said, “you can see how I’d really like to know what happened to her—that’s if you’re not too busy to talk me through it. What Kennedy doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

The corners of Cooper’s mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, “Do come in.”

Long corridors, elegant stairwells, not-bad old watercolors on the walls—someone had draped fake-pine-needle garlands between them, for that discreet balance of festive and somber. Even the actual morgue, a long room with ceiling moldings and high windows, would be beautiful if it weren’t for the little details: the thick chilly air, the smell, the stark tiles on the floor, the rows of steel drawers lining one wall. A plaque between drawers said, in neat engraved letters, FEET FIRST. NAME TAG ON HEAD.

Cooper pursed his lips thoughtfully at the drawers and ran a finger along the line, one eye half closed. “Our new Jane Doe,” he said. “Ah, yes,” and he stepped forward and pulled a drawer open in one long flourish.

There’s a switch you learn to flick, very early on in Undercover. It gets easier, maybe too easy, with time: one click, somewhere in a corner of your mind, and the whole scene unfolds at a distance on a pretty little screen, in living color, while you watch and plan your strategies and give the characters a nudge now and then, alert and absorbed and safe as a general. The ones who don’t find the switch fast wind up in new squads, or in the ground. I flicked that switch and looked.

The bones were arranged perfectly, on their slab of metal; almost artistically, like the ultimate jigsaw puzzle. Cooper and his crew had cleaned them up somehow, but they were still brownish and greasy-looking, except for the two neat rows of teeth, Colgate white. The thing looked a million times too small and fragile to be Rosie. For a split second, a part of me even hoped.