I kept hitting the mental switch, hard. For a second I saw the line of Rosie’s throat when she laughed.

Cooper told me, just to ensure he fucked up my head as thoroughly as was humanly possible, “The skeleton shows no other perimortem injuries, but the level of decomposition makes it impossible to determine whether there were any injuries to the soft tissues. Whether, for instance, the victim was sexually assaulted.”

I said, “I thought Detective Kennedy implied she had clothes on. For whatever that’s worth.”

He pursed up his lips. “Very little fabric remains. The Technical Bureau team did in fact discover a number of clothing-related artifacts on or near the skeleton—a zipper, metal buttons, hooks consistent with those used in a brassiere, and so forth—which implies that she was buried with a full or near-full complement of clothing. This does not, however, tell us that this clothing was in place at the time of burial. Both the natural course of decomposition and the considerable rodent activity have shifted these items enough to make it impossible for anyone to say whether they were buried on her or merely with her.”

I asked, “Was the zipper open or closed?”

“It was closed. As were the brassiere hooks. Not that this is probative—she could have re-dressed herself after an assault—but it is, I suppose, indicative to some degree.”

“The fingernails,” I said. “Were they broken?” Rosie would have put up a fight; a hell of a fight.

Cooper sighed. I was starting to bore him, all these standard-issue questions that Scorcher had already asked; I needed to get interesting or get out. “Fingernails,” he said, giving a dismissive little nod at a few brownish shavings beside Rosie’s hand bones, “decompose. In this case, they, like the hair, were partially preserved by the alkalinity of the environment, but in a severely deteriorated form. And, as I am not a magician, I am incapable of guessing their condition prior to that deterioration.”

I said, “Just one or two more things, if you’ve got the time, and then I’ll be out of your way. Do you know if the Bureau found anything else with her, apart from the clothing artifacts? Keys, maybe?”

“It seems probable,” Cooper said austerely, “that the Bureau would have more knowledge of that than would I.”

His hand was on the drawer, ready to slide it shut. If Rosie had had her keys, either because her da had given them back or because she had nicked them, then she had had the option of coming out the front door that night, and she hadn’t taken it. I could only think of one reason for that. She had been dodging me, after all.