She’d imagined how hard it was for Marco Lucero to see his first corpses floating in the river, but even she wasn’t prepared to see them spread out on those metal tables in neat, cold rows in the morgue, their wounds stark and ugly and bloodless.

As awful as they had appeared in the water, they looked barely real now.

She stood at the swinging doors a long time, unsure if she could go in.

“There’s no reason for you to stay for this,” Texas DPS crime scene technician Ron Delaney said, standing too close to her. Ron had taught one of her classes in Austin, and they’d both been surprised to find each other again on the banks of the Rio Grande in the Big Bend. After Doc Hanson had officially signed off on the bodies, it had been left to CST Delaney to coordinate the evidence collection and recovery of them on scene, and he’d gone out of his way to allow America to watch him work, carefully explaining in clipped sentences everything he did. He was a tall man, with thinning hair and an unfortunate mustache, and other than the obvious habit of trying to hide his thick silver wedding ring, she liked him. He’d been gentle with the dead, paciente was the word that came to America’s mind—almost reverent—as the hours had worn on and they’d had to work in the mud under the hot glow of the light stands. He never sped up or took a long break, giving each one his full attention.

Danny had been there, too, for a while, helping her and Delaney and the other technicians. He didn’t have the same interest in forensics that she did, but he’d wanted to be there with her all the same. Then he got called out again to a fight at Mancha’s, a place she knew all too well, and he and Till Greer had ended up wrangling three drunks, two broken car windows, and one stabbing. Other than the occasional text message, she hadn’t seen him since.

It had been a hard twenty-four hours for both of them.