Right away, I could see something was very strange. Wrong. Both.

The body bag bulged in the middle and lay flat against the table at the ends. I was dreading this in a way I couldn’t have imagined beforehand.

The remains.

Dr. Carbondale stood across from us and pulled back the zipper. “The heat sealing is ours,” she said. “I closed it back up after my initial exam earlier.”

Inside the body bag there was a second bag. This one looked like some kind of industrial plastic. It was a frosted white translucent material, just clear enough to show the color of meat and blood and bone inside.

I felt like my mind shut down for a few seconds, which was as long as I could deny what I was seeing. It was a dead person in that bag but not a body.

Caroline but not Caroline.

Chapter 4

THE DRIVE BACK to Washington was like a bad dream that might never end. When Bree and I finally got home, the house was starkly quiet and still. I thought about waking Nana, but the fact that she didn’t get up on her own told me she was out cold and needed the rest. All of this bad news could wait until later in the morning.

My birthday cake sat untouched in the refrigerator, and someone had left the American Airlines folio on the counter. I glanced at it long enough to see two tickets for Saint John, an island in the Caribbean I’d always wanted to visit. It didn’t matter; all of that was on hold now. Everything was. I felt as though I was moving in slow motion; certain details had an eerie clarity.

“You have got to go to bed.” Bree took me by the hand and led me out of the kitchen. “If for no other reason than so you can think clearly about this tomorrow.”

“You mean today,” I said.

“I mean tomorrow. After you rest.”

I noticed she hadn’t said sleep. We dragged ourselves upstairs, took off our clothes, and fell into bed. Bree held my hand and wouldn’t let go.

An hour or so later, I was still staring at the ceiling, hung up on the question that had been dogging me ever since we left Richmond: Why?

Why had this happened? Why to Caroline?

Why a goddamn wood chipper? Why remains instead of a body?

As a detective, I should have been thinking about the physical evidence and where it could lead me, but I didn’t exactly feel like a detective, lying there in the dark. I felt like an uncle, and a brother.

In a way, we’d lost Caroline once before. After Blake died, her mother didn’t want anything more to do with the family. She’d moved away without so much as a parting word. Phone numbers were changed. Birthday presents were returned. At the time, it seemed like the saddest possible thing, but since then, I’d learned—over and over—what a staggering capacity the world has for misery and self-inflicted wounds.