It didn’t matter how much you loved a person.

Eventually, you had to let them go.

Between the vertical edges of the binders, under the glass top of her desk, a photo of Ethan looked out. He was smiling and had an ice cream in his hand, while Ira was holding the camera up, at the end of an outstretched arm, in order to fit them both into the frame. Light shone in the perfect blue of Ethan’s eyes, his skin unblemished. She switched cases, flipping open the front of the motel binder, and shifted the paperwork across the desk so that it completely covered the portrait of her son’s face. Ethan had looked different this morning when she’d left at six, less angelic, his diaper sagging, his nose still blocked from the cold he couldn’t shift. He’d been crying too, trying to escape from his high chair as Ira attempted to feed him. But healthy or unwell, laughing or crying, even-tempered or difficult, she didn’t ever want him – even his photograph – to come close to the world contained inside the binders. Not now. Not ever.

She refocused.

The full autopsy report from Dan Chen was due this morning, but Jo had seen and heard enough the day before to know she shouldn’t expect much. She’d spent ninety minutes in a white room in the basement of the county coroner’s building as Chen carved apart Gabriel Wilzon, and she’d still come away with nothing.

Leafing through the shots of Wilzon, she looked at the artist’s sketch that had been made from what the manager at the Star Inn could remember, but so far it had got her very little. Wilzon was Hispanic – Chen had confirmed as much – but the sketch made him look Caucasian. It felt like she’d studied the sketch and the photographs a thousand times over, one half of Wilzon liquefied, the other half showing more traditional signs of decomp: at the Star Inn, his back had a sheen to it where the breakdown had begun and blisters had formed and ruptured on his skin; in pictures that Chen had taken at the autopsy, he was cleaned up, his face like wax, his body bloated from the gases.