“No,” Eden said. “Forty-three calls and hits on the website so far. We logged them all and are doing callbacks or sending units out to a few of them. We can expect more calls when the description comes out in tomorrow’s paper.”

Mahler nodded. Homicide investigations without an initial victim identification were not uncommon. Bodies were discovered without wallets or purses. Their identity had to come from the world noticing the space they left behind—a family member not arriving home, an empty office chair. This, Mahler knew, took time—time they didn’t have in this case. “I want her identity tomorrow morning. Get through all the callbacks tonight. If they sound promising, have them come in and look at photos.”

He approached the detectives’ desks. “What else do we know?”

Coyle scrolled through a document on his laptop. “Trish sent over the initial report from the field techs. Looks like evidence of strangulation. Bruising on the neck.”

“Was it a cord?” Rivas asked.

“No. Hands, probably, from the front. But Trish said she won’t know for sure until after an autopsy.”

“What about the head wound?” Rivas asked.

Coyle read on his screen. “Cut on the occipital artery on the left side of the skull. Five centimeters long. Trish thinks strangulation was the cause of death, but the cut was concurrent. But she’s not willing to say definitively yet.”

“So someone strangled and cut her at the same time? How’s that happen?”

“Does anything make sense? By the way, Trish puts time of death at about eleven Monday night. Which means, if the car on the surveillance tape at four in the morning is connected to this, the killer had about five hours to get to the park.”

“Which doesn’t tell us much,” Rivas said. “He might’ve spent five hours trying to decide what to do and ten minutes driving there.”

Listening to this back-and-forth, Mahler thought of the elusiveness of usable information in a murder investigation.

Rivas handed a printout to Mahler. “MUPS, the Missing Persons Database, has fourteen females. None matches our victim’s physical characteristics.”

“How far’d you go?”

“North Bay. You want me to include San Francisco?”

“May as well, until we start getting something from the call-ins.”

Coyle stepped up to the whiteboard, where he had taped the black-and-white printouts from the park’s surveillance camera. One showed a man in a hooded jacket, the other a car’s trunk and bumper. “This guy appeared at the Violetti Gate about four and removed the chain across the roadway. Which took some planning. We had our guys go back up there and go over the lock and chain. No prints, but there’s evidence he was somehow able to dismantle the padlock.”

“It’s not Partridge,” Rivas said. “He’s taller.”

“Can we estimate height and weight from the video?” Mahler asked.

“I’ll try. It’s not a great film.”