She removed the SIM card from her phone and put it safely in the tray in front of the Peugeot’s gear shifter. She took out the dead man’s SIM from the little baggie and slotted it in. The card fit perfectly into the smart phone and made a satisfying click to let us know it was safely seated. She looked at me with eyebrows raised. I said, “So far so good.”

She restarted the phone. It took maybe a minute for the thing to turn back on, but it seemed like ten. Anticipation was high. The medical examiner’s office sat like a bunker against the wooded backdrop of the cemetery. It was a Catholic cemetery with stone crosses and religious figurines, built to last, unlike the occupants.

The phone made a sound. I looked at Nazari and she nodded. It was her phone restarting. We both watched it, waiting for something to happen. There was no magic, the phone just turned back on. I said, “Is it working?”

She looked at the phone and pointed to the top of the screen. “Working. Got signal and everything.”

“Can you see what’s on the card?”

“Give me a second.” She went into the phone’s contacts and things were different. There was only one contact saved to the SIM card, ‘Office’. Next to the word was a phone number with a +964 prefix. She went into an internet page and searched ‘+964 phone prefix’. The search page didn’t even wait for her to finish tapping in letters before it spit out a line of text, ‘Iraq telephone code 964’.

She tapped around in her phone but couldn’t find anything else unusual.

“It’s an international SIM card I think.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It says so on the network information screen.”

“So what does that mean?”

“I’m no expert but I guess it means you can use the SIM card in a bunch of different countries. So if the guy bought it in Iraq he’d be able to use it here or in other countries as long as he’d paid credit onto the card.”

“So it’s like an international burner phone card or something.”

“Something like that. Can’t be traced to an individual person.”

“You haven’t found anything else?”

“No. But I haven’t checked too hard. You want to look while I drive? We might be able to plug the SIM card into my computer back at the Vaugeois house.”