“Yes, ma’am.” He glanced at me.

I went past him, heading downstairs. I needed to talk to Wesley, but maybe I should get hold of Marino first. As I rode the elevator down, I debated if I should call the C.A. in Sussex and warn her about Ring. At the same time all of this was going through my mind, I felt dreadfully sorry for Pleasants. I was scared for him. As farfetched as it might seem, I knew he could end up charged with murder.

In the morgue, Fielding and the troopers were looking at the pedestrian on table one, and there wasn’t the usual banter because the victim was the nine-year-old daughter of a city councilman. She had been walking to the bus stop early this morning when someone had swerved off the road at a high rate of speed. Based on the absence of skid marks, the driver had hit the girl from the rear and not even slowed.

“How are we doing?” I asked when I got to them.

“We got us a real tough one here,” said one of the troopers, his expression grave.

“The father’s going ape shit,” Fielding told me as he went over the clothed body with a lens, collecting trace evidence.

“Any paint?” I asked, for a chip of it could identify the make and model of the car.

“Not so far.” My deputy chief was in a foul mood. He hated working on children.

I scanned torn, bloody jeans and a partial grille mark imprinted in fabric at the level of the buttocks. The front bumper had struck the back of the knees, and the head had hit the windshield. She had been wearing a small red knapsack. The bagged lunch, and books, papers and pens that had been taken out of it pricked my heart. I felt heavy inside.

“The grille mark seems pretty high,” I remarked.

“That’s what I’m thinking, too,” another trooper spoke. “Like you associate with pickup trucks and recreational vehicles. About the time it happened, a black Jeep Cherokee was observed in the area traveling at a high rate of speed.”

“Her father’s been calling every half hour.” Fielding glanced up at me. “Thinks this was more than an accident.”

“Implying what, exactly?” I asked.

“That it’s political.” He resumed work, collecting fibers and bits of debris. “A homicide.”

“Lord, let’s hope not,” I said, walking away. “What it is now is bad enough.”

On a steel counter in a remote corner of the morgue was a portable electric heater where we defleshed and degreased bones. The process was decidedly unpleasant, requiring the boiling of body parts in a ten-percent solution of bleach. The big, rattling steel pot, the smell, were dreadful, and I usually restricted this activity to nights and weekends when we were unlikely to have visitors.

Yesterday, I had left the bone ends from the torso to boil overnight. They had not required much time, and I turned off the heater. Pouring steaming, stinking water into a sink, I waited until the bones were cool enough to pick up. They were clean and white, about two inches long, cuts and saw marks clearly visible. As I examined each segment carefully, a sense of scary disbelief swept over me. I could not tell which saw marks had been made by the killer and which had been made by me.