“Has the body been ID’d yet?” he asked, knowing the answer. It was just an attempt to get the ball rolling, to show that he had been focused on this investigation rather than concerning himself with the mystery of who killed Brix Garrison. Red treads, red treads. The words ran on a loop in his mind ever since they’d left Morgan’s lips.

“Not yet. Winthorp’s got the bones at her office. Last I heard, she submitted a request for dental records.”

Hudson nodded. Identification through dental records could take six to eight weeks, maybe longer. It was possible they could get authorization to push it along quicker, but not unless something came along to make the case more urgent. A word that never applied to cold cases. However, it was clear they were dealing with more than a disappearance; the mystery of Clive Reynolds’s fate involved at least one homicide. Nevertheless, the homicide was twenty years old. He knew what the state’s perspective would be: that the identity of the drowned man in the car had waited two decades. It could wait another two months.

“You see that, don’t you?”

Hudson looked to where Kole was pointing. He wore black latex gloves; they both did. The bitter December air seeped in at the wrists and got trapped. His hands felt like blocks of ice. He bent and peered through the driver’s side window to see inside the cramped interior. The back seat was so small, it looked like it could only fit a fridge pack of soda, possibly a child lying across it. And this was not a vehicle for children, as Kole mentioned when he first introduced Hudson to the dive team’s photos. Built to accelerate to sixty miles per hour within five seconds, the Porsche 930 Turbo had a nasty habit of killing its owners, earning the moniker the Widowmaker.

But the back seat wasn’t what Kole wanted him to see. It was the rusted rod with a bulbous head that lay across it. Hudson sized it up. It was too short to be a golf club. “Torque wrench?” he guessed.

Kole looked mildly impressed. “Didn’t peg you for a car guy.”

“I’m not, but I’ve watched a few How It’s Made episodes in my time.”

“Good show. What’s funny, is—well, it’s not funny,” Kole said as he took his phone out of his coat pocket, “was that the passenger’s right eye socket was busted. Winthorp sent me this.”

Hudson glanced at the image on Kole’s phone. It was a picture of a skull set on a white cloth. A hand held a ruler next to the broken orbital bone. No, it wasn’t just broken, it was gone. Apparently, it had been pulverized so severely that pieces had torn away and floated to the bottom of the lake.

“He was dead before impact.”

“Or close to it,” Kole acknowledged.

Hudson stepped back to broaden his depth of field. “The driver’s side window. It was rolled down.”

“Or smashed out completely.”