beside the stone table, looking at something on the edge. I knew it was Sophie right away; that backboard-straight posture cuts through the anonymous coveralls. Sophie is my favorite crime-scene tech. She is slim and dark and demure, and on her the white shower cap looks like she should be bending over wounded soldiers’ beds with cannon fire in the background, murmuring something soothing and giving out sips of water from a canteen. In actual fact, she is quick and impatient and can put anyone from superintendents to prosecutors in their place with a few crisp words. I like incongruity.

“Which way?” I called, at the tape. You don’t walk on a crime scene until the Bureau guys say you can.

“Hi, Rob,” Sophie shouted, straightening up and pulling down her mask. “Hang on.”

Cassie reached me first. “Only been dead a day or so,” she said quietly, before Sophie caught up. She looked a little pale around the mouth; kids do that to most of us.

“Thanks, Cass,” I said. “Hi, Sophie.”

“Hey, Rob. You two still owe me a drink.” We had promised to buy her cocktails if she got the lab to fast-track some blood analysis for us, a couple of months before. Since then we’d all been saying, “We have to meet up for that drink,” on a regular basis, and never getting around to it.

“Come through for us on this one and we’ll buy you dinner as well,” I said. “What’ve we got?”

“White female, ten to thirteen,” Cassie said. “No ID. There’s a key in her pocket, looks like a house key, but that’s it. Her head’s smashed in, but Cooper found petechial hemorrhaging and some possible ligature marks on her neck, too, so we’ll have to wait for the post for cause of death. She’s fully dressed, but it looks like she was probably raped. This one’s weird all round, Rob. Cooper says she’s been dead somewhere around thirty-six hours, but there’s been practically no insect activity, and I don’t see how the archaeologists could have missed her if she’d been there all yesterday.”

“This isn’t the primary scene?”

“No way,” Sophie said. “There’s no spatter on the rock, not even any blood from the head wound. She was killed somewhere else, probably kept for a day or so and then dumped.”

“Find anything?”

“Plenty,” she said. “Too much. It looks like the local kids hang out here. Cigarette butts, beer cans, a couple of Coke cans, gum, the ends of three 28

Tana French

joints. Two used condoms. Once you find a suspect, the lab can try matching him to all this stuff—which will be a nightmare—but to be honest I think it’s just your basic teenage debris. Footprints all over the place. A hair clip. I don’t think it was hers—it was shoved right down into the dirt at the base of the stone, and I’d bet it’s been there a good while—but you might want to check. It doesn’t look like it belonged to some teenager; it’s the allplastic kind, with a plastic strawberry on the end, and you’d usually see them on younger kids.”