As was their custom, Glenn and Irene Boynton rose at dawn and dealt with the morning rush, renting equipment, seling bait, filing coolers with ice, sandwiches, and canned drinks. When Irene went to check on a bass boat returned late the previous day, an odd rippling drew her to the end of the dock. Peering into the water, the woman was terrified to see two lidless eyes staring back.

Folowing Crowe's directions, I found Fontana Lake, then the narrow dirt track leading to the marina. The rain had tapered off, though the leaves overhead were stil dripping. I wound through puddles toward the lake, my tires throwing up a spray of mud and water.

As the marina came into view, I saw a wrecker, an ambulance, and a pair of police cruisers bathing a parking area in oscilating red, blue, and yelow light. The marina stretched along the shore on the lot's far side. It consisted of a dilapidated rental office — gas station — general store, with narrow wooden piers jutting into the water at both ends. A wind sock fluttered from a corner of the building, its bright colors jauntily snapping in the breeze, jarringly at odds with the grim scene on the ground below.

A deputy was interviewing a couple in jean shorts and windbreakers on the southernmost pier. Their bodies were tense, their faces the color of pale putty.

Crowe stood on the office steps talking to Tommy Albright, a hospital pathologist who occasionaly did autopsies for the medical examiner. Albright was wrinkled and scrawny, with sparse white hair combed straight across his crown. He'd been making Y-incisions since the Precambrian, but I'd never worked with him.

Albright watched me approach then held out a hand.

We shook. I nodded to Crowe.

'I understand you knew the victim.'

Albright tipped his head in the direction of the ambulance. The doors stood open, revealing a shiny white pouch lying on a colapsible gurney. Bulges told me the body bag was already occupied.

'We puled her out just before the storm broke. Are you wiling to try a quick visual?'

'Yes.'

No! I didn't want to do this. Didn't want to be here. Didn't want to identify Primrose Hobbs's lifeless body.

We walked to the ambulance and climbed in back. Even with the doors open the smel was noticeable. I swalowed hard.

Albright unzipped the bag and the odor roled over us, a nauseating cocktail of stagnant mud, seaweed, lake creatures, and putrefying tissue.

'I'd guess she was in the water two or three days. She's not scavenged too badly.'

Holding my breath, I looked into the bag.

It was Primrose Hobbs, but it wasn't. Her face was bloated, her lips swolen like those of a tropical fish in an aquarium. The dark skin had sloughed in patches, revealing the pale underside of her epidermis, and giving her body a mottled appearance. Fish or eels had devoured her eyelids, and nibbled her forehead, cheeks, and nose.