“Mom!”

“Don’t ‘Mom’ me!” she said. “You are so grounded for skipping school!”

She turned to Kendall. “What’s going on here? The boys are truant. They’re not felons. What gives with the entire Sheriff’s Office camped out on my front yard?”

“Mrs. Taylor,” Kendall said, “I’m afraid the boys have made a frightening discovery.”

She looked over to where Josh Anderson was crouched next to a body. Ms. Taylor instantly knew what she was seeing, even at fifty yards away. She worked in a hospital. She’d seen her share of stiffs, though not in her own backyard.

“They found a body floating in the bay,” Kendall said.

Belinda Taylor’s face went a shade paler. She reached for her son and pulled him close. Ordinarily, with his best friend present, Devon would have resisted. Right then, despite his age, a little motherly reassurance felt pretty good.

“Mom, I’m sorry we skipped school.”

“Ms. Taylor, it was my idea,” Brady said.

She shook her head. “That’s not important. What’s important is that you need to tell the detective what you boys saw. We’ll deal with the other issue later.”

A black Tercel in need of a new muffler pulled in behind the coroner’s van. The detectives looked up and offered a slight nod to Serenity Hutchins as she stepped out of her car.

“The reporter is here,” Josh said, letting out an exasperated sigh. “I’ll handle her.”

Kendall made a face. “Be nice.”

Serenity started toward them, but Josh intercepted her before she got close enough to see what was going on.

The teens told Kendall that they had no idea who the victim was. In fact, they were a little embarrassed to admit they really hadn’t gotten close enough to see her features clearly.

“It kind of creeped us out,” Devon said.

“Big-time,” Brady said.

Even if they had found the courage to get a closer view, it was apparent to everyone within ten feet of the body that there was one major obstacle.

The victim had no face.

Kendall made a few notes and looked back at Josh and Serenity, who were still talking.

Jeesh, she thought, we’ve got a dead woman down here. Can’t you give a quick quote and tell the reporter to back off?

She left the boys and Ms. Taylor and joined a pair of coroner’s assistants as they hoisted the corpse into a body bag.

The woman was about twenty. She was white, with small hands and thin ankles. She wore no shoes. Her blue jeans were tiger-striped on the crotch, markedly visible even with the fabric sodden with seawater. Too perfect to be the casual striping of an expensive pair of jeans that had been crafted to look old. She wore a pale green top that had been carelessly buttoned: the top button had been fastened to the hole in the second position. The blouse was cotton and had absorbed blood in two patches aligned with the dead woman’s breasts. A cursory examination of the body indicated nothing out of the ordinary that might help ID her quickly. No special jewelry. No tattoos were visible. No purse and no wallet.

No nothing.

Whoever the young woman was, whatever she’d been in life, it would be up to an autopsy to tell her story.

“Tell Dr. Waterman I’ll be around for the autopsy in the morning,” Kendall said to one of the assistants. Dr. Waterman’s place was the county morgue.

“Jesus,” Josh said, “and I was beginning to think our dry spell would last into the holidays.”

The summer had only brought one other murder: a Port Orchard teenager had been stabbed by his brother over a twenty-dollar bill. Before that was the springtime murder of Celesta Delgado, the Salvadoran brush picker who had apparently been killed by a rival over salal and huckleberry.

“Yeah,” Kendall said, “you were wishing yesterday for something other than a gun or drug case. Looks like your prayers have been answered.”

Chapter Twenty-one

September 18, noon

South of Port Orchard

The drive from Little Clam Bay took longer than the trip there. The county evidently had some money in its coffers, because a couple of flaggers in orange vests were planted on Little Clam Bay Road as a yellow backhoe prepared to cut into the ditch. A row of twenty-four-inch drainpipes sat on a flatbed truck parked off to the side; at least, it was supposed to be off to the side. It jutted out into the roadway just enough to turn a two-lane into a one-lane.

Kendall rolled down her window and addressed the flagger, a woman of about twenty.

“Can’t we just scoot by? I think I can make it.”

“Sorry, but no. Yesterday’s rain did a number on the shoulder. Be about five minutes, max.”

Kendall pushed the button to raise her window. Rain had sprayed over her left side. As the car idled, she looked over at Josh, who was lamenting his ruined shoes and how he was sure to catch a cold. He’d unlaced his shoes in an effort to speed up the drying process.

“Turn the heat up, will you?”

Kendall obliged.

“She looked young,” she said. “Maybe a teenager.”

“The flagger?”

“The victim,” she said, knowing that he was just playing with her.

“Yeah. She was.”

“What do you make of the boys, Josh?”

“Young and dumb and full of…you know the rest,” he said. “Just unlucky enough to skip school and more scared that their parents would find out they’d been smoking cigars than they were about getting in trouble for cutting class.”

“ Devon made a big point of saying that we’d find his DNA on the cigar he dropped in the bay.” The flagger waved them on, and Kendall put the car in gear. “Maybe she was a student at their school,” she said.

“Doubtful. They go to junior high. That girl looked older. But we can check it out. Let’s get back and run the missing-persons database and see what pops up.”

“I’ll be surprised if she’s from around here,” Kendall said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because she looked like a girl who’d be missed, that’s why. The people around here call us if their kids are an hour late from the movies.”

A sly grin broke out over his face. “That they do.”

Kendall nodded without remarking.

“Let’s run by Sedgwick,” Josh said. “We ought to check out the boys’ story, and it’s on the way.”

John Sedgwick Junior High was one of those immense edifices that looked authoritative and utilitarian at the same time. Its chief bits of architectural interest were the four pillars that flanked the front of the building: they were massive tubes of painted concrete. That was it. Form, no style. When Kendall Stark and Josh Anderson made their way toward the front door, a kid called out.

“You here about the dead body?”

Kendall turned toward the voice. It came from a skateboarder in low-slung black jeans, a blue hoodie, and a chain that went from, presumably, his wallet to his belt loop. He had dark blue eyes and the faint tracings of a mustache that he’d obviously been nurturing to look older, and maybe a little tougher. She recognized Matt Gordon despite his attempt at facial hair.

Josh looked at Kendall. “You know that kid?”

“Shoplifter, but not a good one.”

“Officer Stark,” the teen said, “we all know.”

She didn’t correct him by pointing out that she now carried a detective’s shield.

“How’s that?”

Without saying a word, Matt Gordon poked at the keys on his phone and held it out.

On his iPhone screen was an image of the tragic scene they’d just left at Little Clam Bay. Kendall noted the time stamp: twenty minutes before the Sheriff’s Office had been notified.

“ Devon and Brady need a lesson on priorities,” she said to Josh.

“Huh? Brady blasted it out this morning,” Matt said. “Let me show you another.” The kid was grinning nervously now. Kendall had cut him some slack on the shoplifting case, and he was trying to be a good citizen. “Here.”