Looking at the body, watching her long hair ebb and flow with the current is surreal. Neither of us moves or speaks. The tempo of the rain increases, but I barely notice. I don’t feel the wet or the cold. I can’t stop looking at the dead girl, and I wonder how her life came to this terrible end so long before her time.

I pull myself back to reality. When I speak, my voice is level and calm. “How long do you think she’s been there?”

“She’s intact. No deterioration that I can see.”

I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. “No visible wounds,” I say, thinking about the blood we found on the road that afternoon.

“Still wearing her underclothes.”

But we both know it’s no guarantee that a sexual assault wasn’t committed. Perpetrators have been known to re-dress their victims. “No makeup or jewelry. Nails are unpainted. Tomasetti, that dress is an Amish print.”

“Goddamn it.”

I look upstream, toward the bridge, but it’s too dark to see anything. “You think someone dumped her here? Or at the bridge?”

He shines the beam on the ground, illuminating several footprints, ours and a waffle stamp that may or may not be Foster’s. But there are no broken branches. No crushed grass. No blood. “No obvious sign of a struggle,” he growls. “We’re going to need to get tread imprints from Foster’s shoes.”

He trains the beam on the steep bank directly below us, then shines it across the surface of the water. The creek is about twenty-five feet wide. It looks deep, but I can hear the gurgle of a shallow bottleneck a few yards downstream. “He could have dumped her upstream. Current carried her down.”

“Or stopped on the bridge and threw her over,” I say.

“Shit.” Pulling out his phone, Tomasetti calls Goddard and asks him to cordon off the bridge. “Tire-tread impressions are a long shot,” he says as he snaps his phone closed.

“We might get lucky.”

Neither of us believes that. It’s extremely difficult to extract meaningful evidence from an outdoor scene that’s spread over a large area, especially if it’s been left unprotected or trampled. Or rained on.

For several minutes, we stand there, using our flashlights, getting a sense of the scene. I wish for a camera, but we’re going to have to hoof it back to the Tahoe to get it. I make a mental note of the time and memorize as much as I can—the location and position of the body, the slant of the tree, the erosion of the bank, the profusion of roots at the water’s edge, the victim’s clothes. But I know it’s her face that will stay with me.

“We need to go back, get the camera, and a generator and lights,” Tomasetti says after a moment.