The call came in at 4:17 in the morning, and Tessa Marlowe was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table in her apartment on the third floor of a converted mill building in Burlington. The coffee in her mug had gone cold an hour ago. She had been staring at a photograph in a manila folder, the kind of photograph that insurance companies kept in locked drawers: a totaled sedan, a jackknifed tractor-trailer, a body covered in yellow plastic.
Her phone buzzed against the laminate countertop. The screen flashed a number she recognized, dispatch from Apex Mutual's after-hours line.
"Marlowe," she said.
"Tessa, it's Sandra at the desk. We got a rollover out on Route 9. Single vehicle, rural stretch past Brattleboro. Driver didn't make it. Engine was still running when the trooper found him."
Tessa set down the photograph. She could hear Sandra breathing on the other end, waiting.
"Who's the adjuster on site?"
"Dale Fenwick. He's the one who flagged it. Says the circumstances are unusual. He wants a lead investigator out there before they move the vehicle."
"Define unusual."
A pause. Sandra's voice dropped half a register.
"He says the radio was tuned to static. And the driver's seatbelt was unbuckled, but the airbag deployed anyway. And there's no skid marks."
Tessa closed her eyes. In her line of work, you learned to hear the things people did not say. No skid marks meant no braking. No braking on a rural road at night meant either the driver fell asleep, or he never tried to stop.
"What time did it happen?"
"Sometime around two. The wreck wasn't discovered until a few minutes before four. A trucker came through and saw the headlights pointing up out of the ditch."
"Who's the deceased?"
"Calvin Briggs."
The name landed in the silence between them. Tessa opened her eyes.
"Calvin Briggs," she repeated. "The retired sheriff?"
"Yes ma'am. Calvin Briggs, age seventy-one. Retired from the sheriff's department up in Lamoille County thirty years ago. Controversial resignation, but that was a long time back."
Tessa knew the name. Everybody in Vermont insurance circles knew the name. Calvin Briggs had spent three decades enforcing the law in one of the most isolated mountain counties in the state, and he had walked away from it in a cloud of bad press and unanswered questions. After that, he had worked for a while as a mail carrier, then disappeared into the kind of quiet retirement that people only manage when they are determined to be forgotten.
Dale Fenwick had been one of Calvin's deputies, back in the day. Tessa remembered that from the personnel file. Dale had left the department two years before Calvin did, and had bounced around half a dozen jobs before landing at Apex as a junior adjuster. He was not the sort of man who flagged things without reason.
"I'm going," Tessa said. "Send me the coordinates and the case number. I'll be there before sunrise."
"Tessa, you don't have to. It's the middle of the night. We can have Marvin Quist take it in the morning."
"No." Tessa was already standing, already pulling her coat off the hook by the door. "If Calvin Briggs is dead on Route 9 with no skid marks and the radio on static, I want to see the car before the sun hits it."
She ended the call and stood in the dark of her kitchen for a moment, listening to the building settle around her. The old mill had a way of groaning at night, the timber beams expanding and contracting as the temperature dropped. She could hear the river out back, running fast with snowmelt.
She thought about Calvin Briggs. She had never met him. She had only read about him, in the old newspaper clippings that Apex kept in their archives, the ones that detailed his career and his disgrace. A principled man, the clippings said. A stubborn man. A man who had resigned rather than sign off on something he did not believe in.
She also thought about Dale Fenwick. Dale was a worrier. Dale was the kind of man who called his supervisor twice a day just to confirm that his work was acceptable. If Dale was calling at four in the morning to say that circumstances were unusual, then circumstances were more than unusual. They were wrong, in some way that Dale could sense but not articulate.
Tessa grabbed her keys, her coat, and the heavy-duty Maglite she kept by the door for nights like this. She locked the apartment behind her and walked down the two flights of stairs to the garage level, where her company vehicle waited, a silver Ford Explorer with the Apex Mutual logo on the door.
The drive to Brattleboro would take her two hours, maybe two and a half, depending on the weather. The forecast called for clear skies and a hard frost. The roads would be icy in the hollows, treacherous on the curves.
She started the engine and pulled out onto the dark street, heading south.
The stretch of Route 9 where Calvin Briggs died was the kind of road that mapmakers forgot to label. It curved along the bottom of a river valley, through stands of birch and pine, past a few scattered farmhouses whose owners had long ago stopped expecting visitors. There were no streetlights. There were no guardrails. There was only the blacktop, cracked and patched, and the moon, which hung low and bright over the western ridges.
Tessa found the wreck at 5:48, forty minutes before sunrise. She saw the police cruisers first, their light bars pulsing red and blue against the trees. Then she saw the tow truck, parked at an angle on the shoulder, its operator leaning against the cab with his arms folded. Then she saw the car.
It was a late-model Buick LeSabre, pale green, resting on its passenger side in the ditch at the base of an embankment. The front end was crumpled against a stand of young maples. The driver's door hung open, pointing up at the sky. The dome light was still on, casting a yellow glow into the cold air.
Tessa parked behind the trooper's cruiser and got out. The cold hit her immediately, a sharp, dry cold that made her sinuses ache. She could smell wood smoke from somewhere, and the faint, sweet rot of leaves decomposing in the ditch.
A state trooper approached her, a tall man with a mustache and a heavy coat. He held out his hand.
"You Marlowe?"
"Yes."
"Trooper Goss. Phillip Goss. We've been waiting for you."
"Where's Fenwick?"
"Up the road a piece. He walked up to the farmhouse to use the phone. Cell service is patchy down here."
Tessa looked past the trooper at the Buick. The engine was off now, but she could see the dark stain of fluid on the ground beneath it. Oil, probably. Or transmission fluid. Or something else.
"Tell me what you found," she said.
Trooper Goss jerked his chin toward the wreck. "Vehicle left the roadway at approximately oh-two-hundred hours. Driver was alone. Single occupant. He was ejected on impact."
"Ejected?"
"Yep. Seatbelt wasn't fastened. Airbag went off, but he was already partway out the door. We figure the door popped open when he hit the embankment, and he went out through it."
Tessa looked at the open door. The glass was shattered. The frame was bent.
"Skid marks?"
"None to speak of. There's a little scuffing where he went off the pavement, maybe fifteen, twenty feet before the ditch. But no braking."
"No braking," Tessa repeated.
"No braking."
"Where is he?"
Trooper Goss pointed up the embankment, toward a stand of pines at the top of the slope. Two figures in reflective jackets stood near the tree line. One of them was holding a flashlight.
"Up there. We covered him, but we didn't move him. We were waiting for the M.E."
Tessa walked to the open door of the Buick and looked inside. The interior was lit by the dome light, which had somehow survived the crash. She could see the steering wheel, deformed by the airbag. She could see the dashboard, the cracked plastic, the radio.
The radio was still tuned to a frequency, but there was no sound coming from it. Just a faint hiss, a low and steady static that rose and fell like breath.
Tessa leaned closer. She could see the dial. It was set to a frequency at the very top of the FM band, a frequency that no commercial station in Vermont used.
She straightened up and looked at Trooper Goss.
"The radio," she said. "Who turned it off?"
"Nobody. It was playing when we got here. We figured the battery died."
Tessa looked at the dashboard. The clock was dark. The cigarette lighter was dark. The headlights were dark. But the radio was still on, still hissing.
"The battery's not dead," she said.
Trooper Goss looked at the radio, then back at her.
"Then I don't know what to tell you," he said.
Tessa reached into the car and turned the volume up, just for a second. The static grew louder, filling the cab of the Buick. She listened to it. There was something in the static, a faint rhythm, a pulse that came and went. She could not tell if it was a signal or if it was just interference.
She turned the volume back down.
"I want to talk to the man in the farmhouse," she said. "I want to talk to Fenwick."
"Yes ma'am."
Trooper Goss walked her to the cruiser and drove her up the road, half a mile, to a small white farmhouse with a porch light on. A man was sitting on the porch steps, hunched against the cold, his collar turned up.
He stood when the cruiser pulled in. He was middle-aged, soft around the middle, with thinning hair and a worried face. He looked like he had not slept in a week.
"Fenwick?" Tessa said.
"Yes ma'am." He came down the steps, his hand out. "Dale Fenwick. I've been waiting for you."
Tessa shook his hand. His palm was clammy.
"Tell me why you flagged this," she said.
Fenwick's hand trembled in hers. He let go too quickly and stuffed both hands into his jacket pockets, shoulders climbing toward his ears.
"Because of the seatbelt," he said. "That's what got me. The driver's side. It was buckled. I saw it when I pulled up. Buckled clean, strap across the lap, the metal tongue seated in the buckle. But nobody was in the car."
Tessa let that sit for a moment. The porch light hummed above them, a small orange bulb behind a wire cage. Somewhere down the road, a dog was barking in fits and starts.
"That's not unusual," she said. "People panic. They jump out and run."
"Not on this road," Fenwick said. "Not at that speed. You'd be mush. Plus the airbag didn't go. I checked. The module is intact, the sensors look fine. It never fired."
Tessa studied his face. He was talking too fast, the words tumbling over each other like stones down a slope. His eyes kept darting to the cruiser, to Trooper Goss, to the dark tree line beyond the yard.
"You checked the airbag module," she said. "You're an insurance adjuster."
"I was a cop once," Fenwick said. "Thirty years ago. Before the insurance work. You learn what to look for."
"And you flagged this for investigation because the airbag didn't deploy."
"I flagged it because the whole thing stinks." He swallowed. "No pun intended. Look, Miss Marlowe, I've been writing these reports for nineteen years. Fender benders, deer strikes, the occasional drunk who wraps himself around a telephone pole. You see enough wrecks, you develop a feel. This one felt wrong from the second I stepped out of my truck."
Tessa stepped off the porch and walked back toward the cruiser. Fenwick followed, almost trotting to keep up. The cold bit at her cheeks, and she could smell wood smoke from a chimney somewhere down the valley.
"Show me what you saw," she said.
They drove back to the wreck in Fenwick's truck, a rattling Ford Ranger with a cracked dashboard and a registration sticker two years expired. Trooper Goss followed in the cruiser. The road was narrow and unlit, and the headlights picked out the warped metal of the Buick at the far end like a tooth pulled from a gum.
Tessa took her camera from the cruiser and began at the front of the vehicle, working clockwise. She photographed the shattered grille, the bent hood, the way the engine block had torqued sideways on impact. The radiator cap was gone, and a faint wisp of steam still curled from the ruptured hose, though the engine had been cold for hours. She made notes on a small pad, her handwriting tight and slanted.
She moved to the driver's side door. The window was gone. The seat was pushed forward, the adjustment lever broken. The steering column had collapsed, the wheel bent at a twelve-degree angle from true. She photographed all of it.
Then she leaned in through the window frame and looked at the seatbelt.
It was buckled. The strap ran across where a driver's lap would be, the steel tongue seated in the buckle with a satisfying click when she pressed it with her thumb. The webbing was taut, as though it had arrested a body. But there was no body. There was no driver. There was nothing in the car at all except the faint smell of old upholstery and something else, something sharper, that caught in the back of her throat.
She photographed the buckle, then the airbag cover, then the dashboard. She reached up and popped the cover open with a pen. The airbag sat folded inside its compartment, untouched. The inflator canister was intact, the wiring harness plugged in. The whole system looked factory-fresh, as though the car had rolled off the lot that morning.
"That's what got me," Fenwick said from behind her. "I pulled that cover myself. Looked right at it. Never fired."
Tessa nodded but did not turn around. She was looking at the dashboard now, at the faint film that coated the plastic just below the windshield. It was almost invisible, a kind of bloom on the surface, like the residue left by a hard frost. She leaned closer. The substance was powdery, almost chalky, and it had settled into the grain of the dash in a way that suggested it had been airborne inside the cabin for some time.
She touched it with her fingertip. The texture was fine, almost talc-like. She brought her finger to her nose and sniffed.
The smell hit her like a slap. Bitter almonds. Chemical. Sharp enough to make her eyes water.
She straightened up, her hand still raised, and looked at Fenwick.
"What's this?" she said.
"What?"
"This powder. On the dash."
Fenwick leaned past her and looked. His face went pale in the camera flash.
"I don't know," he said. "I didn't see that before."
Trooper Goss came up beside them, his boots crunching on the gravel.
"Smells like something burned," he said.
Tessa shook her head. "Not burned. Something else."
She took three more photographs of the residue, then a fourth of Fenwick's face as he stared at the dashboard. He did not look like a man who recognized the smell, but he looked like a man who wished he didn't.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small evidence vial and a swab. She scraped a sample of the powder from the dash and sealed it in the vial. She labeled it with the date, the time, the location, and her initials. Then she put it in the cooler she kept in the trunk of her car, alongside the other samples she had collected from the engine bay.
"The vehicle manual," she said. "It's in the glove box. I want to read it."
Fenwick handed it to her. It was a softcover booklet, the cover damp and warped. She flipped to the section on airbag systems and read it by the light of Trooper Goss's flashlight.
There was no mention of any powdery residue. There was no mention of bitter almonds. The manual described the airbag inflator as a sodium azide propellant, which it said could produce a fine, non-toxic dust upon deployment. The dust was described as "similar to talcum powder." It was not described as smelling of almonds. It was not described at all, beyond a single sentence.
She closed the manual and handed it back.
"This isn't from the airbag," she said.
"Then what is it?" Fenwick said.
Tessa did not answer. She was looking at the seatbelt again, at the way the webbing was creased across the empty seat. The crease was deep, almost grooved, as though someone had been wearing the belt for hours. But the buckle had latched only recently. She could see the faint scoring on the buckle housing where the tongue had scraped against it as it slid home.
She took another photograph, then a fifth, then a seventh.
"I want to talk to the owner of this vehicle," she said. "Whoever registered it."
"That would be a woman named Marjorie Hennings," Fenwick said. "Lives over in Readsboro. I called her this afternoon. She says the car was stolen from her driveway three days ago."
"Was it reported?"
"No."
"Did she report it tonight?"
"She said she was going to. She didn't sound like she wanted to talk long."
Tessa looked at him. "Why not?"
Fenwick shrugged. "I don't know. She sounded scared."
The dog down the road had stopped barking. The silence that replaced it was heavy, pressing against her eardrums. She could hear the river now, somewhere in the dark below the road, running fast over the stones.
She walked back to her car and opened the trunk. She pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and took a clean swab from her kit. She went back to the Buick and leaned in through the window. She swabbed the inside of the buckle housing, the surface of the dashboard where the residue was heaviest, and the air vent on the driver's side. She sealed each swab in its own vial and labeled them.
Then she pulled the glove box open and dumped the contents onto the passenger seat. The owner's manual, a tire pressure gauge, a gas receipt dated two weeks ago, a faded photograph of a young girl holding a cat. She photographed each item and put them into paper evidence bags.
"What are you looking for?" Fenwick said. He had gotten braver, or maybe just more curious. He was leaning in over her shoulder now, his breath sour with coffee and cigarettes.
"I'm looking for whatever doesn't belong," Tessa said.
She held up the photograph. The girl was perhaps seven years old, with dark hair and a smudge of dirt on her cheek. She was smiling at the camera. The cat was orange and unhappy.
"Who is this?" Tessa said.
"I don't know," Fenwick said. "Maybe the owner's daughter."
The gas receipt was from a station in Wilmington, dated twelve days earlier. The car had been driven at least forty miles since then. The odometer read a hundred and fourteen thousand. The tire pressure gauge showed twenty-eight psi in the front right, twenty-six in the front left, thirty-two in the rears. The rears were overinflated. The fronts were underinflated. She made a note.
She closed the glove box and stepped back from the car.
"I want to take the seatbelt assembly," she said. "The buckle housing, the webbing, the retractor. All of it. I want the airbag module too. And the inflator canister."
Trooper Goss looked at her. "That's a lot of parts."
"I know."
"We don't usually pull a whole belt assembly."
"I know that too."
Fenwick shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Miss Marlowe, can I ask why?"
Tessa looked at the seatbelt again. The crease across the empty seat. The powder on the dash. The smell of bitter almonds.
"Because somebody was wearing this belt," she said, "and somebody wasn't here to take it off."
The evidence locker at the Stowe office was narrow and fluorescent, the kind of room that smelled of cardboard and stale coffee. Metal shelves lined both walls, each bin labeled in neat block letters. Tessa set the seatbelt assembly on the workbench and unclipped the evidence tag from her belt loop.
The buckle housing came apart with a small flathead screwdriver. She photographed each component before touching it, the way she had been trained, the way she had trained others. The webbing showed no fraying. The retractor spun freely when she pulled. The latch plate was unbent. She laid the pieces on the bench in order: tongue, buckle, webbing, retractor, anchor. Five pieces of a system designed to keep a human body inside a car during a violent stop.
The airbag module was heavier than she expected. She set it on the bench and pressed the diagnostic button. A single amber light blinked twice, then went dark. No codes stored. No deployment record. She turned the module over and examined the inflator canister. The housing was intact. The seam welds were clean. There was no corrosion, no impact deformation, no sign that the bag had ever fired.
She set the module down.
The car had hit a tree at fifty-one miles per hour. The steering wheel had not buckled. The airbag had not deployed. The seatbelt had not locked. In a modern sedan with dual front airbags, seat-mounted side airbags, and pretensioner retractors, every system had failed at once.
She wrote the words in her notebook, in block letters, underlined twice: EVERY SYSTEM FAILED.
The chemistry lab results came back at four-seventeen that afternoon. Benzaldehyde, trace levels. Within normal range for a vehicle interior that had been recently cleaned. No elevated hydrocarbons, no unusual solvents, no accelerants. The only anomaly was a faint petroleum residue on the passenger side floor mat, consistent with a mechanic's rag.
She read the report twice, then called the lab. "The residue on the mat. Can you tell me if it matches any specific product?"
"Hold on." The analyst put her on hold. Soft jazz played for forty-five seconds. "It's a generic penetrating oil. Could be WD-40, could be PB Blaster, could be any number of similar products. We can't distinguish between them at these concentrations."
"Can you tell me how much was applied?"
"No. But the pattern suggests it was wiped rather than sprayed. A rag, probably. And it was applied recently, within the last week or so."
She thanked him and hung up.
The light outside the office window was going amber, the shadows of the pines lengthening across the gravel lot. She sat at her desk and looked at the photograph of the girl and the cat. The cat's expression was hard to read. The girl's was not. The girl was smiling the way children smile when they have been told to smile for the camera, when the photographer is a parent they trust.
She opened the death file and began to type.
The report took shape slowly, each sentence weighed and placed. She wrote the facts as she knew them: subject found unresponsive in vehicle, no signs of trauma, postmortem consistent with sudden cardiac event. Toxicology pending. Toxicology would come back clean. She had requested it anyway.
Cause of death: accidental.
Manner of death: natural.
She read the report again. The words sat on the screen like stones.
She thought about calling Calvin Briggs. She picked up the phone, then set it down. There was nothing to tell him that would not be a lie, and she was not ready to lie to him. Not yet. Not until she understood what she was looking at.
She saved the file and printed two copies. She signed the first and initialed each page. She placed it in the outgoing tray.
The second copy she folded once and slid into her bag.
At six-fifteen, she locked the office and walked to her car. The lot was nearly empty. A single crow sat on the hood of her sedan, watching her with one oil-black eye. She waved it off and it lifted, complaining, into the spruce.
The drive to Morrisville took thirty-five minutes. The sky was the color of a bruise, purple and orange at the horizon, the first stars pricking through above the ridgeline. She parked outside the building and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel.
Dale Fenwick was waiting in the lobby, shifting from one foot to the other. He wore the same jacket from the scene, though he had changed his shirt. The new one was blue, a shade too bright for the lighting.
"Miss Marlowe." He fell into step beside her. "How did it go out there?"
"It's a death scene, Mr. Fenwick. Death scenes don't go."
"Right, right." He rubbed his hands together. "Listen, I wanted to catch you before you filed. There's something we should discuss."
They rode the elevator to the third floor in silence. The doors opened onto a hallway with grey carpet and closed doors. He followed her to her office and hovered in the doorway.
"Mr. Fenwick, I have a report to file."
"I know, I know. Just give me two minutes."
She set her bag on the desk and turned on the lamp. "Two minutes."
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The click of the latch was very loud.
"The deceased," he said, speaking fast, the words tumbling. "He carried a policy with my company. Four hundred thousand dollars, accidental death, no exclusions. Clean policy. Pristine. Paid up since two thousand and fourteen."
"I'm sorry to hear about your company's loss."
"It's not a loss, Miss Marlowe. It's a payout. A four-hundred-thousand-dollar payout." He swallowed. "The company wants this closed. The family wants this closed. Everyone wants this closed."
"The family?"
"His wife. She's the beneficiary. She filed the claim this morning."
Tessa sat down behind her desk. The chair creaked under her.
"And how did the wife seem?"
"What do you mean?"
"When she filed the claim. Did she seem upset?"
He blinked. "I, uh. I didn't take the call myself. Our intake department did."
"I see."
"Look, Miss Marlowe. I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job."
"That's reassuring."
"I'm just saying. This is a straightforward case. Man dies in his car on a back road. Heart attack, probably. Sad, but straightforward. His wife gets the money. His kid gets the money. Everyone moves on."
"You've spoken to his daughter?"
"I told you, I didn't take the call."
"But you know he has a daughter."
Fenwick's mouth worked. "I, uh. I may have seen a photograph. In the file."
"In the file you haven't been given access to."
He went pink. The flush started at his collar and climbed.
"Mr. Fenwick, who showed you that photograph?"
He didn't answer.
"Was it your supervisor? Was it someone at the carrier? Did someone from claims send it to you?"
"I think I should go," he said.
"Sit down."
He sat. The chair was plastic and he sat on the edge of it, his knees together, his hands between them. He looked like a boy waiting for the principal.
"Who showed you the photograph, Mr. Fenwick?"
He swallowed. "A guy I know. From the old days. He, uh. He worked with your uncle, I think. Back when your uncle was still in uniform."
Tessa went very still.
"What's his name?"
"I'd rather not say."
"Mr. Fenwick. I am asking you a direct question in the course of an active investigation. You are required to answer."
He looked at the floor. He looked at the door. He looked at his hands.
"His name is Gus Albright," he said. "He's a private investigator now. Out of Burlington. Someone hired him to look into the death, and he called me to ask what I knew about the scene."
"Who hired him?"
"He didn't say."
"And you showed him the file?"
"I didn't show him the file. I described the scene. He asked about the airbag, the seatbelt, the car's condition. I told him what I saw."
"What did you tell him about the airbag?"
"That it hadn't deployed."
"And the seatbelt?"
"That it was unbuckled."
"And the car?"
"That it was running."
Tessa closed her eyes. When she opened them, Fenwick was still sitting on the edge of the chair, his face the color of bread dough.
"Mr. Fenwick. I need you to listen to me very carefully. The information you shared with Mr. Albright is part of an active investigation. It is not public record. It is not gossip. It is evidence."
"I understand."
"Do you? Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you took an active part in compromising a death scene investigation. It looks like you did this for a man you know from your previous employment, a man connected to the family of the deceased, a man hired by an unknown party with a four-hundred-thousand-dollar motive."
Fenwick's mouth opened. No sound came out.
"I am going to file my report. I am going to recommend that the file be reopened pending further investigation. And I am going to note, in writing, the conversation we just had."
"Miss Marlowe, please. I have a family. I have a mortgage. If this gets out, I could lose my job."
"Then you should have thought of that before you opened your mouth."
She turned to her computer and began to type.
Fenwick sat in the plastic chair for a long moment. Then he stood, walked to the door, and let himself out. The door clicked shut behind him. She listened to his footsteps recede down the hallway, quick and uneven, like a man trying not to run.
She typed until the words blurred, then she saved the file and printed a fresh copy. She initialed each page. She signed the last page and slid it into the outgoing tray.
The photograph of the girl and the cat was still on her desk. She picked it up and looked at it for a long time. The girl was smiling. The cat was not. There was a smudge of dirt on the girl's cheek, just below her left eye, in the shape of a thumbprint.
She put the photograph in her bag, next to the folded copy of her report. She turned off the lamp and locked the office.
Outside, the sky was fully dark. The stars were thick above the ridgeline. She stood by her car and dialed Calvin Briggs. The phone rang four times. Five. Six. She was about to hang up when the line clicked.
"Tessa." His voice was rough, as if he had been asleep. "What time is it?"
"Almost eight. I'm sorry to call so late."
"You're always sorry." She could hear the smile in it, small and tired. "What's wrong?"
"I need to talk to you. In person. Tomorrow morning."
A pause. The line hissed faintly.
"This about the wreck on Route 9?"
"Yes."
Another pause, longer this time.
"All right," he said. "My place. Eight o'clock. I'll put coffee on."
She thanked him and hung up. The crow was back on her hood, watching her with that same oil-black eye. She opened the door and the bird lifted, screaming, into the dark.
She drove home through the empty night, the folded report beside her on the seat, the photograph of the girl and the cat in her bag, and the smell of bitter almonds she had imagined, or perhaps not imagined, lingering in her hair.