Hurt waits for her in the parking lot, next to his own car, which she rarely sees him drive, a pine-green Honda Element that she thinks he probably also uses for camping. There’s a round sticker on the back that says ADK46er. He paces the lot in khakis and hiking boots.

“It’s one of those days,” he says, “that I wish I still smoked.”

She pats her own bag. Sometimes she has a pack stashed. She tried quitting when she moved to Spring Falls, but she finds herself picking up a pack more often than not. She still savors a cigarette with her morning coffee. After a meal. And when she’s stressed.

“Me too,” she says to Hurt.

They meet the coroner, Elise Diaz, inside. She’s a tiny woman, no more than five foot two, slim with a sleek bob, and exquisitely dressed in a black pencil skirt and a silk blouse. She wears four-inch heels and she’s still shorter than Kateri.

Hurt introduces her as his partner, Kateri Fisher.

“New,” Elise Diaz says, and appears to size her up.

“To the area,” Kateri says, her hackles up. “I’ve been a detective for seven years.”

Dr. Diaz raises her eyebrows at Hurt. “Well, Detective Hurt and I have been working together for decades, haven’t we, Joel?” she says.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Hurt says. His smile looks like a grimace. “I’m not quite as old as you are,” he jabs.

Diaz lays her hand on the back of Kateri’s arm. “Good to have fresh blood,” she says. She leads them down the hallway, her heels clicking, her tiny ass barely moving. She walks, Kateri thinks, like she’s the first lady, giving a tour of the White House.

In the exam room are bones on a table. They’ve been discolored from the fire, charred and cracked in ways that most likely occurred postmortem. There’s a slender curve of spine and, disconnected, only half the ivory butterfly of a pelvis.

“What can you tell us?” Hurt asks Diaz.

“It’s undeniably female,” she says. She pulls on gloves and points at the faint pits in the bone. “Parturition scarring. Due to a vaginal delivery.” She tucks her hair behind her ear and looks up at Kateri.

“Do you have children, Detective Fisher?” she asks.

“No,” Kateri says, looking at the bones.

Diaz laughs lightly. “Probably for the best,” she says.

“These were nearby,” Hurt says, and pulls a plastic evidence bag for Kateri to examine. There’s a bag with a shoe, a soft-sided suede ankle boot caked with mud and blood, and in another bag a braided bracelet, laced with beads and caked in part with blood.

“How close were these?” Kateri asks.

“Within ten feet,” Hurt says.

“Only one shoe?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She turns the bracelet over in her hands, examining the yarn, the little silver beads. There are tiny bells where the bracelet latches, and she thinks of Pearl, beaten, bleeding, being carried or dragged through the woods having lost a shoe. Her wrist tinkling with the sound of bells as she went.