‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But don’t act like you didn’t have other options.’

She leans closer, and nibbles my earlobe. ‘You know, I used that app for a while—nTangle. But the guys I met, they always looked at me like I was a piece of meat.’

I can’t help but glance towards the kitchen.

‘You hungry?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I say—and, for the first time ever, it’s true. ‘You?’

‘I could eat.’

Her phone rings. I look at the clock. It says four am, but I never changed it when daylight savings ended, so it’s five.

‘Hold that thought.’ She crawls over to her handbag. I admire the view.

She picks up the phone. ‘Can this wait, Vasquez? I’m in the middle of something.’ She shoots me a wink, which stirs parts of me I thought were done for the night.

Then her face changes. ‘Say again?’

A pause.

‘Okay. We’ll be right there. I mean, I’ll find Blake and be right there.’

She drops the phone. ‘We gotta go,’ she says. ‘DNA came in. The severed hand we found? It doesn’t belong to Biggs.’

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 32

Two girls are born on the same day to the same mother, and yet they are not twins. Why?

‘Run all that past us again,’ I say.

‘Certainly.’ Dr Norman lays out all the DNA tests in a neat row on one of the morgue slabs. The numbers and graphs and percentages are meaningless to me.

Thistle’s hair is still damp from the shower. She looks remarkably good for a woman who has had zero sleep. I don’t think I’ve pulled up so well.

While Thistle was in my bathroom, the fear returned. I hovered outside the door, listening to the running water, picturing her bare feet on the worn surface of the tub and wondering if she could tell if a skeleton had recently dissolved in it. When it was my turn in the shower, I worried that she was looking in my freezer rather than reading a follow-up email from Vasquez. When we got to her place, where she picked up a change of clothes, I wished I’d asked her if we could both shower there.

If this is going to work, long term, I need to do something about my house.

‘This is the DNA test from the blood in the severed hand,’ Norman says, pointing. ‘It doesn’t match this test, which is the cheek swab from Hope. But it does match the blood group we have on file for Kenneth Biggs—O positive—and it does match this, which is the DNA test from the blood on the wall planner at the dump.’

‘So the hand doesn’t belong to Biggs,’ Thistle says, ‘but it does belong to a middle-aged man, right?’

‘Correct.’