“Ben’s good. One of the best we’ve ever had,” she continued. “Maybe another ME wouldn’t have noticed it. But Ben loves the details. Apparently, the human body is like any other meat. You can freeze it and thaw it, but not without some changes in—how did he put it?—consistency. The flesh on your husband’s extremities felt wrong to him. So he took a few samples, stuck them under a microscope, and hell if I understand all the science, but basically determined damage at a cellular level consistent with the freezing of human tissue. You shot your husband, Tessa. Then, you put him on ice.”

I didn’t speak.

D.D. leaned closer. “This is what I don’t get, though. Obviously, you were buying time. You needed to get something done. What, Tessa? What were you doing while your husband’s corpse lay frozen in the basement?”

I didn’t speak. I listened to a song instead, playing in the back of my mind. All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, my two front teeth, my two front teeth.…

“Where is she?” D.D. whispered, as if reading my mind. “Tessa, what did you do with your little girl? Where’s Sophie?”

“When are you due?” I asked, and D.D. recoiled as if shot, while five feet away, Bobby inhaled sharply.

He hadn’t known, I determined. Or maybe he’d known, but not known, in that way men sometimes do. I found this interesting.

“Is he the father?” I asked.

“Shut up,” D.D. said curtly.

Then I remembered. “No,” I corrected myself, as if she’d never spoken. I looked over at Bobby. “You’re married to another woman, from the state mental institute case, couple years back. And you have a baby now, don’t you? Not that long ago. I heard about that.”

He didn’t say anything. Just stared at me with cool gray eyes. Did he think I was threatening his family? Was I?

Maybe I just needed to make conversation, because otherwise I might say all the wrong things. For example, I used snow, because it was easy enough to shovel and didn’t leave behind trace evidence such as a dozen empty ice bags. And Brian was heavy, heavier than I’d imagined. All that working out, all that pumping up, just so myself and a hit man could lug an extra forty pounds down the stairs and into his precious, never-any-tool-out-of-place garage.

I’d cried when I scooped the snow on top of my husband’s dead body. The hot tears formed little holes in the white snow, then I had to pile on more snow and all the while my hands were shaking uncontrollably. I kept myself focused. One shovel full of snow, then a second, then a third. It took twenty-three.

Twenty-three scoops of snow to bury a grown man.