I said, “They would, of course—it’s hardly your job, Doctor—but half of them are one step up from trained monkeys; I wouldn’t trust them to know what case I was talking about, never mind give me the correct info. You can see why I wouldn’t want to play the monkey lottery on this one.”

Cooper raised his eyebrows a wry fraction, like he knew what I was doing and didn’t care. He said, “Their preliminary report lists two silver rings and three silver stud earrings, all tentatively identified by the Dalys as consistent with jewelry owned by their daughter, and one small key, compatible with a low-quality mass-produced lock, that apparently matches the locks of a suitcase found earlier at the scene. The report lists no other keys, accessories or other possessions.”

And there I was, right back where I had been when I first set eyes on that suitcase: clueless, catapulted into zero-gravity dark without one solid thing to grab hold of. It hit me, for the first time, that I might never know; that that could actually happen.

Cooper inquired, “Was that all?”

The morgue was very quiet, just the temperature control humming to itself somewhere. I don’t do regrets any more than I do drunk, but this weekend was special. I looked at the brown bones spread out naked under Cooper’s fluorescents, and I wished from the bottom of my heart that I had backed off and let sleeping girls lie. Not for my own sake; for hers. She was everyone’s, now: Cooper’s, Scorcher’s, the Place’s, to pick at and finger and use for their own purposes. The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whole, the same way its ground had eaten her body. She had been better off in that basement. At least the only people running their hands over her memory had been the ones who loved her.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was all.”

Cooper slid the drawer shut, one long shush of steel on steel, and the bones were gone, honeycombed in tight among all the rest of his question-marked dead. The last thing I saw before I walked out of the morgue was Rosie’s face still shining on the light board, luminous and transparent, those bright eyes and that unbeatable smile layered paper-thin over rotting bone.