I watch as they collect Aubrey. The little girl reluctantly puts down a teddy bear that Celia gave her—a tool that the coroner’s office employees use to calm and distract children at the scene. Frank says the plush toy is dirty, and she should leave it. Aubrey looks more like her mother than her father, and I wonder how that will play with the Flynns and Adam as they try to carry on. I wonder if they’ll see Sophie’s face when they look at Aubrey as she grows up. I wonder if they will hear Aubrey’s laugh and instantly think of the woman who was recovered from the reeds at Octopus Hole. I wonder if Aubrey will exist on her own, or if they’ll turn her into a constant reminder of what has been lost forever.

Dr. Tamara Collier has been the pathologist for Kitsap County for six months, having replaced a longtime and much-admired pathologist who’d left to work for the Makah Nation on the Olympic Peninsula. Our county has only sent Dr. Collier a handful of cases—two were deaths associated with car accidents, one a house fire, and the case that Frank Flynn shoved in my face like a rancid cream pie: Cathy Rinehart.

We exchange hellos, and as she ushers me inside the exam room, she lets me know she’s already determined the cause of death.

“Blunt force trauma to the back of the head,” she says, looking at me over her drugstore readers. “Someone hit her hard. Swung for the fences.”

I don’t like the analogy. I’ve never been much for sports.

“I see,” I say as she rotates a beam of light onto Sophie’s head. Her hair had concealed it at the crime scene, but it was there, the bruising and gash in the back of her scalp.

Dr. Collier is so short that she steps on a booster to do the exam. She’s wearing green scrubs hemmed with masking tape. I think of two things just then. She’s resourceful, and Kitsap County is too cheap to get her a custom size.

“Is that bruising around her neck too?” I ask.

“Good eye. It’s faint, but yes. Looks like the SOB that did this choked her too. I don’t think it’s what killed her. I’ll have to get in there to figure that out.” She glances at her saw. I’m not sticking around for that.

“What about sexual assault?” I ask. “At the scene, we thought we saw some indicators.”

She looks at me. “Did you now?” she asks, in a tone that shifts the dynamics in the room. She’s very short, but she’s big on what she’s been called to do.

“I’m not a pathologist,” I’m quick to say. I’ve had enough conflict for one day. “Wondering what you were thinking.”

She peers over the tops of her drugstore readers. “I’d say so. I’ll do the swabs of everything, every which way, and see what the lab tells us. But, yes, I think you and your field team were right.” She stops and looks back at the body in front of her, the light shimmering over Sophie’s lifeless skin.