"Now just one goddamned minute," Teitscher exploded. "That is bullshit, and you know it."

Stride held up his hands. "Both of you, knock it off. We're not going to do this now."

"This is not about black or white," Teitscher insisted, jabbing his finger at Guppo. "This is about a case that's ice-cold."

"You're right," Stride said. "It's a cold case, and I never said it wasn't. Both of you drop it, and move on. Who was the last person to really touch the case?"

"Other than you and Maggie?" Guppo said. "It was Nicole."

Stride looked at him in surprise. "Nicole?"

"Sure, when she came back after the shooting on the bridge, you gave her half a dozen cold cases rather than put her right back on the street. The Enger Park case was one of them."

"I don't recall seeing any of Nicole's notes in the case file," Teitscher complained.

"That's a surprise?" Guppo said. "Nicole was always months behind in her paperwork."

"Well, if she was working it, we should find out if she latched onto something we've missed," Stride said. "Abel, I want you to go down and talk to her."

Teitscher's brow knitted into a maze of angry lines. "You're shitting me."

"No. Do it tomorrow. We need to move fast."

"It was six years ago. What the hell is she going to remember?"

"You won't know until you ask her."

"I'm the last person she's going to talk to," Teitscher said. "Send Guppo. He and Nicole were as thick as thieves."

"We need Guppo working the evidence here. I need you to do this, Abel, so suck it up."

Abel shook his head fiercely. "This is unfuckingbelievable."

He turned and stalked away from them, climbing back up the deep snow of the hillside toward Hank Jensen Road. His trench coat flew up behind him as if he might become airborne, and each of his strides was long and hard.

"I'd give good money to see him and Nicole together," Guppo said.

Stride smiled. "Yeah." He and Guppo looked up as the medical examiner investigator on the scene waved to them.

"Hey, detectives!"

Violet Gabor was a short, squat woman in her early thirties with a baseball cap turned the wrong way on her head. She was bent over the corpse, with a magnifying glass focused on the victim's ankle.

"We got something here," she told them.

Stride bent down. His knees were quickly wet with snow. He squinted where Violet was pointing. "I can't see, what is it?"

"Man, you're old," she told him.

"I'm seasoned, Vi."

"Roasts are seasoned," she replied. "You're just old. It's a tattoo, a small one, on the back of her ankle."

Stride saw it now. The tattoo was nestled in the skin of the victim's ankle and appeared to be a series of letters crafted in an old-fashioned font, the kind of typeface he would expect to see written on parchment. The tiny brand was easy to miss if you weren't looking for it or didn't know it was there. "What does it say?"

"Near as I can tell, it says TLIM," Violet told him. "Whatever the hell that means."

"TLIM? Are you sure?"

"Yeah, it's in purple ink, and the script is a little hard to read, but I'm sure that's what it says. Why, does that mean something to you?"

"Yeah, it does." Stride got to his feet and brushed off the snow. He added in a hushed voice, "Damn."

He felt as if they had killed her themselves by dragging her name into it. By not finding her sooner while she was out there, unprotected, a target. His only salvation was that this time around, the killer had made a mistake. Not catching the tattoo. Not knowing the victim had a secret identity.

Stride knew whose mutilated body was lying in the snow, and it meant this wasn't a random slaying at all. It was somehow connected to Eric's death.

TLIM.

The Lady in Me.

It was Helen Danning.

62

Maggie found Serena in her hospital bed, vacantly staring at the television suspended from the ceiling. When she saw Maggie, she clicked off the screen with the remote control and offered up a weak smile. Her shoulder was bandaged. A clear tube looped around her ears and stretched across her pale, pretty face, delivering oxygen to her lungs. Her black hair was pulled back and tied behind her head. A blanket covered her body, but Maggie could see her bare arms, which were patchy with cherry-red burns.

Serena saw her looking. "Those are the minor ones," she said.

"I know." Maggie pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. She sucked her upper lip between her teeth and clamped down on it. The room was uncomfortably warm. Her eyes wandered to the amber fluid in the IV bag and then to the watercolor print of Canal Park that hung on the soothing baby-blue wall. "I'm not sure what to say. Everything sounds so stupid. How are you. Are you okay. That kind of thing."

Serena eyed the pink box in Maggie's lap. "That for me?"

Maggie looked down. "Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Doughnuts. You want one? I've got old-fashioneds, crullers, and a couple of the cream-filled ones that go splurt when you bite them."

Serena laughed and paid for it with jabs of pain. "Old-fashioned, please."

"You want me to feed it to you?"

"No, my left arm isn't so bad. I can do it."

Maggie opened the box by slitting the tape with her fingernail and handed her a doughnut. Serena wolfed it down in three bites and brushed the crumbs from her lips. Maggie took a chocolate cruller for herself and put the rest of the box on the table beside Serena's bed.

"Why no morphine drip?" Maggie asked.

"I told them to take it away."

"Why? Burns are the worst."

"They set it up so you can push a button and get a shot when you need it," Serena said. "You know me. Addictive personality. I don't want to walk out of here hooked on painkillers."

"You need to manage the pain," Maggie told her.

"When it gets so bad I want to cut off my legs, then I call the nurse and get a shot."

"When did you have your last one?"

"Too long ago," Serena admitted.

"Don't be a martyr."

Serena glanced at the nurse's call button, which dangled near her right hand, but she didn't reach for it. "I saw the news," she said. "The Enger Park thing."

"Stride thinks the body is Helen Danning."

Serena arched her eyebrows. "So there's a tie-in to Eric's murder?"

"Could be."

"That's good for you."

Maggie shrugged and nibbled on the doughnut. She licked chocolate from her fingers. "Just as long as they don't think I did it. Beheading isn't my style, though. I hate all that blood. I prefer a quick tap to the forehead."

"Nice," Serena said.

"I hate thinking about the Enger Park case all over again. I've carried that one around for a long time."

"We all have cases like that."

Maggie knew that was true, but the Enger Park Girl was different. There was something heartbreaking and lonely about the black girl out in the wet grass, not even a girl at all anymore, just a mutilated thing left there to decay. One final humiliation on top of the agony, rape, and death. She wished she could have given the girl a name and a little justice to make her human again. She also didn't tell Serena that it was on that case that her feelings for Stride became something else, because suddenly working with him wasn't just solving crimes, it was suffering emotionally together at the failures.

"Thanks for nailing Blue Dog," Serena said. "I'm not sure I could deal with any of this if he was still out there."

"It was payback for me, too," Maggie reminded her. "He won't bother any of us again."

"That's what I thought before."

"I think even Alabama can manage to keep a one-armed murderer behind bars," Maggie said.

Serena's face was far away, and Maggie didn't know where she was.

"Did he…?" Maggie asked softly. She added, "You don't have to tell me."