When the bathroom fills with enough steam to overwhelm the exhaust fan, I turn off the water and step out of the shower. I do my best to wrap the ridiculously small motel towel tight around me before I leave the bathroom and make sure the room’s drapes are all the way closed before putting on a pair of boy shorts and a Columbia Law T-shirt.

Garrett is lying on the bed in his briefs, his hair still wet from the shower. He looks over at the nightstand. On top is a plastic bag. The tennis bracelet is inside.

“You’re sure that bracelet belongs to her?”

“It looks exactly like the one she was wearing in the video I saw.”

“So what do we do now? Maybe we should just take the bracelet to the police and come clean about where we got the lead.”

“Of course we should. Garrett, we’re on thin ice here, legally speaking.”

“I don’t want us to get charged with anything, Brea, but I also don’t want what we’ve learned so far to go nowhere.”

“If we hand it over,” I say, “we could be considered murder suspects ourselves—or accessories after the fact. Who the hell are we protecting? John DeMarco, a convicted felon? Seymour Washington, a crooked fixer? And what are we going to tell Washington?”

“That’s easy,” says Garrett. “No body, no deal.”

CHAPTER
49

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Detective Sergeant Marie Gagnon of the state police’s Major Crimes Unit slows her unmarked Chevrolet Impala and pulls over into the breakdown lane.

At the scene are two state police cruisers, a tow truck, an orange highway department pickup truck, and a sad-looking Sentra with its trunk half open. Two workers in orange vests are setting out traffic cones to cordon off the area.

Gagnon exits her vehicle, hoping her young son has gone back to sleep by now. He’s been running a fever since dinnertime. For a minute, she’d thought about letting somebody else take this call, but her husband waved her out the door. “Go, go. I got it. I’ll call you if he gets worse.”

When Gagnon walks by the second cruiser, she sees a man in handcuffs in the back seat slumped against the window, sleeping with his mouth open.

Gagnon knows both troopers. “Which one of you boys caught this?”

“It was Josephs’s stop,” says Tasker.

“Hi, Sarge. Right. Dispatch got a report of an erratic operator. I caught up with him here at mile marker fourteen and pulled him over at midnight. He failed all three field sobriety tests and a Breathalyzer.”

“I don’t suppose he mentioned anything about transporting human remains?”

“He did not.”

“Okay,” says Gagnon, “let me see what you’ve got in that Sentra.”