This happens a few times a month. There are an average of thirty homicides a year in Seattle, but she investigates many more bodies than that. In a warehouse, an alley, a canal, a living room. Waterlogged beneath the docks or locked in a trunk or tied up in a storage container. Mia was never found, so every death could be hers. This body—sprawled out on the rocks, one leg immersed in the hot spring—is hers.

Nora pinches shut her eyes so tightly her vision goes red. When she opens them again, the vic comes into focus. Not her daughter. Not a girl. Not even a young woman. It’s a man. He is naked and lies sprawled in the shape of an X, one of his legs floating in the hot spring. A spotlight brightens the water, and she can’t tell if it’s colored a silty red because of blood, algae, or iron. Steam rises, rippling the air, making this rocky depression in the woods look like the dregs of a witch’s cauldron. She will inspect the vic more closely in a moment, but even from a distance she can tell that the murder was not a hurried act of passion but prolonged, even ritualistic.

She takes in the rest of the scene. There are two mountain bikes, one of which is hitched to a rolling trailer with several bins bungee-corded to it. Set upon a folding table is a propane cookstove and a washbasin and several milk jugs full of water. There is a mold-spotted orange tent with the mouth flapped open. A taut blue tarp, dirty with fir needles, hangs at an angle between four trees. Beneath it sit two folding chairs arranged around a firepit.

She knows that she is poor at socializing, but she believes that she is excellent at categorizing people. She narrows in on isolated details—the lustrous hair and thick fingernails of a pregnant woman, the pinched wrinkled mouth of a cigarette addict, the five-hundred-dollar watch favored by bankers, the loping gait of roofers, the brittle, pocked skin of a meth addict—and develops an instant profile.