Her mind strayed ahead, to the heroic efforts of the embalmer, whose job it was to make the dead look more alive. Skin sliced through to raise an artery. Formaldehyde pushed through silent veins until color seeped in and cheeks were less sunken. A mouth sewn shut. Eyes dabbed dry.

Wildeve had once asked why such care was necessary. After all, the dead could not see. But the embalmer, immune to the brutality of his job, had put down the cotton pad he was pressing gently to the tear ducts, and offered a rare smile of sadness. “It can look as if they are crying. Heartbreaking for the family.”

Did the public have any idea of the lengths to which these technicians went to preserve a body from the violence of a postmortem? Wildeve didn’t think so. But that instinct was powerful amongst her mortuary colleagues. To protect the loved ones from the savagery of murder, a car crash, the destruction of fire. To make the viewing process easier. Palatable. As in life, in death. Dressing up the truth, disguising it.

Adam’s face—pale but familiar—appeared, unbidden, in her mind. Her vision blurred and she forced her shaking hands into her pockets. Pushing away that memory of him, she remembered a happier time. Knocked over, fully dressed, by a wave on a beach in Devon, the sea soaking into his shorts. She had tried to pull him out, but had slipped and followed him into the water. He’d laughed so hard he’d wept, tears rolling down his cheeks.

The coolness of the building was a relief from the sweating heat outside. She had been here too many times lately, picking over The Doll Maker’s victims for clues. But Wildeve could not look at the steel refrigerators where the bodies were stored in trays, stacked upon each other, identity tags around their toes. She did not want to think about the vanished lives inside, already waxy with death, or the leaking of gases from their bowels and intestines when the pathologist slit them open and removed the organs.

She did not want to think about any of that at all.

The door to the examination room was closed. They had started without her. But she wasn’t offended. No one was expecting her, and bodies were like meat. Unless they were frozen, they spoiled within hours, especially in this weather, and there was nothing worse than a rotting corpse.

Except two rotting corpses.

A bark of laughter slid from her as the low timbre of Adam’s voice filled her head. She pressed her palms to the swing doors and pushed her way in.

Six heads turned toward Wildeve, and then Detective Constable Jim Sheridan was grabbing her elbow and trying to propel her back the way she’d come.

“You don’t need to be here, Wildeve,” he said. “We’ve got this covered.”

She took them all in, the pathologist and her assistant, the crime scene investigators bagging and scribing exhibits, the CSI photographer, and then she was pushing back, heat behind her eyes, in the back of her throat. She did not expect them to understand. She could barely understand it herself. But she needed to be here. At work. And nothing was going to stop her.