“He was identified this morning.” Reiker watched as she turned to him, pale, her eyes almost opaque. It gave him a bad feeling. He told himself it was because, like every other man in the country, he’d had a fantasy love affair with her mother twenty years before. He told himself it was because she was young enough to be his daughter. At times like this, he wished he’d chosen any other line of work.

“We found a ring, too, an old ring with a lot of fancy carving and three small diamond chips. An hour ago, Joyce Agee identified it as her father’s. William Morgan was murdered and buried in that gully.”

But that was wrong. Maggie dragged a hand through her hair and tried to think. No matter how bluntly, how practically, Reiker put it, it was wrong. “That can’t be. I was told that William Morgan had an accident—something about a car accident.”

“Ten years ago, his car went through the guardrail of the bridge crossing into West Virginia. His car was dragged out of the Potomac, but not his body. His body was never found … until a few days ago.”

Through the rail, into the water, Maggie thought numbly. Like Jerry. They hadn’t found Jerry’s body, either, not for nearly a week. She’d lived through every kind of hell during that week. As she stood, staring straight ahead, she felt as though she were two people in two separate times. “What will you do now?”

“There’ll be an official investigation. It has nothing to do with you, Miss Fitzgerald, other than we need for you to keep that section of your property clear. There’ll be a team here this afternoon to start going over it again, just in case we missed something.”

“All right. If you don’t need anything else—”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’ll be inside.”

As she walked across the lawn toward the house, she told herself that something that had happened ten years before had nothing to do with her. Ten years before, she’d been dealing with her own tragedy, the loss of her parents. Unable to resist, she looked back over her shoulder at the gully as she climbed the steps to the porch.

Joyce Agee’s father, Maggie thought with a shudder. Joyce had sold her the house without knowing what would be discovered. She thought of the pretty, tense young woman who had been grateful for a simple kindness to her mother. Compelled, Maggie went to the pad scrawled with names and numbers beside the phone. Without hesitating, she called the number for Joyce Agee. The voice that answered was soft, hardly more than a whisper. Maggie felt a stab of sympathy.

“Mrs. Agee—Joyce, this is Maggie Fitzgerald.”

“Oh … Yes, hello.”

“I don’t want to intrude.” Now what? Maggie asked herself. She had no part of this, no link other than a plot of land that had lain neglected for a decade. “I just wanted you to know that I’m terribly sorry, and if there’s anything I can do … I’d like to help.”