“I don’t suppose you’ll have much luck with any trace,” I say.

“It might have helped if you’d bagged her hands.”

“She’d been pulled from Hood Canal,” I say. “I didn’t think that there was any need.”

The pathologist looks up. “Meg Fleiss was pulled nude from the Mississippi, a floater no less. Lab in Biloxi found clothing fibers on her nipple rings that matched a suspect. She’d been in the water for seven days.”

I don’t completely see the relevance. Sophie didn’t have any piercings that could hook a fiber.

“DNA?” I ask. “Under her nails?”

Dr. Collier returns her gaze to Sophie’s body. “No. Nothing. But next time, bag the hands. Always bag ’em.”

I stand there as she takes long cotton swabs and runs them along the inside of Sophie’s mouth, her vagina, her anus. She swabs twice for each area and puts the swabs into separate tubes, sealing them and then noting the contents with the case number.

As I watch the pathologist work, I know that this might have been my fate if Adam hadn’t found me. I don’t know when my assailant would have come back or why he ditched me there. Why I was so compliant. I hate thinking about where it might have ended. I’d have been on a table, bloody water running into a drain, my brain removed and weighed, my organs cataloged and then returned willy-nilly to the cavity of my body. I’d have been just like Sophie Warner.

“Lab is running behind,” she says, revving up her saw: my cue to leave.

“Okay,” I say, pulling myself back into the moment. “Thanks, Doctor.”

I have an urge just then to scream out and curse Albert Hodge and what he did to me. I never, ever think about him. I did my best to banish that day into the background of my life, like some flub in a school play that I just didn’t want to think about ever again. Sophie on that table brought it all back. Seeing Adam Warner brought it all back too.

“You okay?” the pathologist asks, turning off her saw.

“I just feel a little sick,” I fib.

She gives me an empathetic smile. I know she’s trying to be kind. “I get it. Have to have a strong stomach for this. My dad said mine was made out of cast iron. Grew up on a farm in Ellensburg. Slaughtered Angus . . .”

She’s still talking as I bolt from the autopsy suite to the restroom down the hall. Inside, I run cold water in the sink and spoon it up to my face. It helps a little, but only a little. Celia, the coroner’s assistant, emerges from a stall.

“God,” she says, “that man was such a jerk. Don’t let it get to you.”

“Yeah,” I say, not letting her know that as bad as Frank Flynn was, he wasn’t the source of my little moment.

I don’t want her to know what I’m really thinking or how I feel. When you have something that you carry inside and never talk about, you don’t ever unleash it on a stranger. And since you’ve never talked about it, you don’t know even how to really frame your thoughts. You fear that your words will tumble out in a way that will only make things worse.