It didn’t take long to find the yearbook photo. Lake Oswego High had uploaded the last ten years’ worth of yearbooks into a digital archive on their Web site. All Archie needed was a password and there she was. The Clackamas County ME’s age estimate had been right on the money. The victim had been twenty-two. The senior photograph—jauntily posed with a tennis racket under one arm—was four years old. Her hair was cut bluntly at her chin, her face was fuller, and her skin was Photoshopped to a dewy plastic sheen, but even on the screen of Henry’s phone, Archie still recognized her from their encounter outside Jack Reynolds’s first-floor half bath.

Her name was Lisa Katherine Watson and she had been voted “most likely to marry a millionaire.”

Lisa Watson’s parents lived in a hundred-year-old house on a quiet street in the old part of Lake Oswego where the streets didn’t have sidewalks and the houses all had gardens.

The same photograph Archie and Henry had seen online was framed on the mantel in the living room. Other photographs were displayed as well: Lisa Watson as a small child with a tennis racket, several of Lisa Watson as a young teenager with a tennis racket, Lisa Watson as an older teenager with a tennis racket. There were no photographs of her parents or any other sibling.

“She was nationally ranked,” Peter Watson said. “Before she started partying.” He was tall and lean and moved gingerly, like an athlete whose joints had paid the price.

Archie nodded. He dreaded this part, the families. Sometimes he felt like the angel of death swooping in to destroy lives. He had to remind himself that he was only the messenger.

“Can I get either of you a glass of water?” Lynn Watson asked hesitantly. She looked like her daughter—the slight overbite and pug nose, her face nearly as pale as a corpse. Archie thought of Lisa Watson on that dock, the ligature marks across her abdomen. She had not died peacefully. But her mother did not want to know that.

“Yes, ma’am,” Henry said, glancing at Archie. “Thank you.”

This was what you did. If the family offered you water, you drank it. It helped sometimes to do something, to have a task. There was a delicate balance to family notification. At first, it was important to be clear, to avoid misunderstandings, hope. Your daughter was found dead. It appears to be a homicide. But once that devastating reality had been established, once it sank in, you did everything you could to avoid referring to the deceased as a body. “She’s at the morgue,” Archie had told the Watsons after delivering the brutal news, “she’ll be released to you as soon as possible.”