“Like I said, we run them on the database. No hits yet. You know, sometimes we never find out. Couple of guys last year, no hits at all. Still unidentified.”

“Where are they?”

“At the mortuary. Over at Affordable Caskets off the freeway, Moanalua. Got cremated. Ashes in a box. But we kept some DNA in a file, just in case.”

“He has a sweet face,” Olive said.

“Haole guy,” Stickney said, and with pride he added, “We autopsy more akamai, so no disfigurement.”

“Looks like wax,” Sharkey said.

“Because more worse exsanguination,” Stickney said, proudly licking the word on his lips. “Bleed out when we work on him.”

All this time the dead man had lain as gray as dead meat, his withered arms to his sides, the fourth person at the conference, a silent, futile presence around whom all the talk had circulated. By degrees, as though daring himself, Sharkey had inched nearer, blinking at it, until the body became less fearsome, its color less shocking, and at last familiar, but tragically so, contorted like a martyr’s.

The man looked drowned, though it took an effort of Sharkey’s dulled imagination to see him as a whole man. He was a fragment, not only in the sense that he’d been cut apart and sawn open and stitched back together, but a fragment as an aura of emptiness, this body as a shell, no more than a carcass—a sad wrapper of dead and folded flesh, its tubes and pipes and organs hauled out and poked over and shoved back in. Its essence was gone. Its essence was life. Its blood had been drained away. It was a spiritless bag of skin and bones, and the skin itself, bluish yellow in places, its limbs ashen, its hands—Sharkey was nearer them now—enclosed in small paper sacks, fastened at the wrist with pale tape.

A surfer held down under a succession of monster waves, pawing not at water but at a smothering boil, ended up this way, suffocated and finally pushed to the beach—pale skin, corpse meat, staring eyes, soupy seawater spilling from his gaping lips. Sharkey had seen them in the sand at the shore break, at least ten drowning victims in his life, young men vital in every way, powerfully built and yet defeated, stiffened by the rigor mortis that seemed to come so quickly. His gaze was always drawn to the hands and feet, perfectly formed and useless, the sad still fingers and toes. But those poor dead men—and one small pale Japanese woman with a fixed face of terror, her mouth rigid, gaping in a silenced howl—they had been whole, newly dead.