The bracelet gives Kateri a cold wave of nausea, creeping up her neck, underneath her ears. She’s seen so much in past cases: blood, gore, body parts, brains. But the bells on the bracelet, ringing, she imagines, as the body dragged, seem particularly delicate and grim to her. She feels green. She needs to get outside.

“Thank you,” she says to Dr. Diaz, and excuses herself to the back parking lot, under a sky that is so heavy she swears she can feel it resting on the top of her head, a mantle, or a cold, dead hand.

Hurt appears at her side. “You okay?” he asks.

“What are we going to do with the kid?” Kateri asks.

“Well,” Hurt answers. He looks down at the ground. “Foster care.”

It hits Kateri like a thud in the middle of her chest. “Let’s see if we have a match to the blood in the house,” she says, and Hurt nods. “And if there’s anything at all we can extract from the burnt bones.”

She walks with Hurt to where their cars are parked side by side.

“Is it enough?” she asks, and knows that it is; it just seems so paltry. Where has the rest of it gone? It takes a long time to burn a human body, she thinks, without the aid of a crematorium. She thinks of the bare pelvis, with its clear markings of childbirth, the way motherhood leaves its trace on you long after you’re dead.

“If the blood matches what we pulled from the house,” Hurt says, “and we can match that to Pearl Jenkins—she has no DNA on file,” he adds, “but we can test the type against her children—then yes,” he says.

She wants to ask, “Who would do this?” But she knows. Murder is almost never anonymous.

They didn’t send her to rehab after her accident. She spent a few days on the rehab floor, drying out, but a facility was never mandatory. It might have been court mandated, but there was no court. There were no charges. The county sheriff decided to keep it quiet. It would have been completely different if she’d hurt or killed someone, or even if another vehicle had been involved. But it was just Kateri and the wall.

They’d asked her—not the chief, but a department psychologist, very delicately—if she was suicidal. She never said the word suicide or kill. But she asked Kateri a lot of questions about feeling overwhelmed, about how she was dealing with it all.

Kateri wasn’t suicidal. She did remember having the vague thought that if she died, well, it would be okay. But she wasn’t about to take any action.

The sheriff unofficially demanded that she attend AA meetings and prove her presence. She went. A few times, while her face healed, while she figured out what to do with her grandmother’s house.

In the months before the accident, her grandmother had declined and died. She was the only type of parent Kateri had had. After, Kateri went home to the empty house on Allen Street every night. Every night she felt unmoored and raw, like she would claw the walls to get out, and so she left. She picked a different bar every night, and for a while a different man. She knew it was dangerous. She left her badge, her sidearm at home. She went out unfettered.