The wind lifts a curl from his forehead, the end matted with blood and sweat, and I get a clear and close-up view of the cut on his brow. He tried to clean himself up with some water and soap in the bathroom upstairs, but he didn’t do a very good job. His efforts only smeared the blood and dirt around, shoved the gunk deep into an even deeper gash.

“As soon as we’re done here, I’m taking you to urgent care. Even with stitches, you’re going to have a nasty scar.”

My words disappear into sirens wailing in the distance. More cops on the way, and it’s a good thing, because the ones here have their hands full. Sometime in the past few minutes, a crime scene tech has arrived, stepping over the yellow tape strung around a U-shaped chunk of yard. Another is crouched low to the ground just outside it, reattaching the tape to branches or weighting it down with rocks, fastening it around wooden stakes he hammers into the frozen ground. They might as well be wrapping the dock in flashing neon lights.

Crime scene. Do not cross. Death happened here.

A chill runs down my spine, and my gaze scans the yard, the shoreline. I feel the cops watching us, feel their disapproving sneers and silent judgment, even though every time I stare back, they turn the other way. I feel their eyes everywhere.

Or maybe it’s just Sam, his face pressed to a camera he fetched from Lord knows where, clicking away. He aims the lens at the wooden planks, the rocky path leading down to the water, the boat and the lake and the shoreline littered with rocks and tangled tree roots. At Paul and me, huddled close enough to share body heat.

“Where is she?” Paul asks, his gaze locked on the slice of lake between the boat and the dock. Micah stands in the very middle, talking to someone on his cell. There’s nothing surrounding him but water.

“You can’t see her from this angle. Not with the boat where it is and her so well under the dock. If I hadn’t happened to look down when I’d been climbing out, I wouldn’t have seen her, either.”

Sam straightens, looking up the hill to where I’m standing, just outside the crime scene tape. “Hey, Charlie, what shoes were you wearing this morning when you came down here?”

I point to my snow boots, wag one around above the dirt. “These.”

He moves closer, stepping carefully over a couple of markers placed in the soil. “Let me see the sole.”

I hold on to Paul’s shoulder for balance and show Sam the bottom. There’s a piece of gravel lodged in one of the thick treads, but otherwise they look fresh out of the box.