I skirted around the uniformed cops, ignored the detectives, walked by the criminals, and headed toward the back of the room, where several desks were clustered. Xavier was already here, sitting at his desk and scribbling on a notepad, a phone wedged in the crook of his neck. He spotted me and waved me over.

   “Yeah . . . yeah,” Xavier said. “Gin just walked in the door. I’ll send her down to you.”

   He hung up, then threw down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and ran his fingers over his shaved head in a sharp, scrubbing motion, as if he were trying to wipe something particularly horrible out of his mind. Curious. Xavier was rock-solid, one of the strongest, toughest, most dependable guys I knew. I wondered what had upset him so much.

   Xavier dropped his hands, leaned forward in his chair, and looked at me.

   “Rough night?” I asked.

   He gave me a faint smile, but his gaze remained dark and troubled. “Aren’t they all?”

   Couldn’t argue with that.

   He gestured at his phone. “That was Bria. She’s downstairs with Ryan. He’s just finished his preliminary examination.”

   I nodded. Dr. Ryan Colson was the head coroner and a friend to both Bria and Xavier.

   Xavier’s mouth twisted, and he stared at me like he wanted to tell me something. After a second, he shook his head, as if banishing the thought. “Ryan will clean up her face as best he can so that Jade can officially identify her. Try to make her look a little less . . .”

   “Beaten, strangled, and dead?”

   He winced. “Yeah. But there’s no softening a blow like that, is there?”

   “Not in my experience.”

   Once again, he gave me a strange, almost pitying look. I wondered what he knew about Elissa Daniels’s murder that I didn’t.

   “Did you guys find anything at the scene?” I asked. “Anything in the trash you collected? Any clue to who might have done this?”

   He shook his head. “Nope. Nothing obvious. Just a bunch of soggy cardboard boxes, empty bottles, and broken glass, which isn’t unusual, given the location. Bria and I will go through all the trash again later, but I’m not holding out much hope of finding anything useful.”

   I nodded. “Thanks for trying, though.”

   Xavier shrugged his massive shoulders. “Just doing my job.” His gaze flicked over to the detectives, who were still standing around the water cooler, watching a video on one of their phones. “Someone around here has to, right?”

   “Right.”

   Xavier jerked his thumb over toward the elevators. “You go on down to the coroner’s office. I’ll stay here and keep an eye out for Sophia and Jade.”

   “Thanks, Xavier.”

   He nodded at me and picked up his phone to make another call.

   I got into one of the elevators, punched the button, and rode down to the basement. The elevator doors opened, revealing a long, empty hallway. After the constant noise and motion upstairs, the lack of sound and people was a bit jarring, as if I’d been transported to a distant, deserted planet, instead of just another floor in the same building.

   I walked down the corridor, my boots whispering against the floor, and opened the door to the waiting room that fronted the coroner’s office. Padded chairs against the walls, dusty plastic palm trees in the corners, a glass table topped with several tissue boxes. The functional furniture was nice enough, but it was still a thoroughly depressing place. Even worse, I could hear the walls wailing with the cries of everyone who’d been unfortunate enough to come here and identify a dead loved one. Soon Jade’s sobs would be added to the ones already here. The mournful notes made my own heart squeeze tight.

   The frosted-glass door at the back of the waiting room buzzed open, and Bria stuck her head out. “There you are. Ryan’s ready for you.”

   I walked through the opening and stepped into a room that was mostly made of metal. Stainless-steel vaults, each one fronted with its own door, lined two of the walls, while several long metal tables took up the center of the room, each positioned above a drain in the floor. It was several degrees cooler in here, and goose bumps rippled down my spine, despite my heavy winter clothes. A sharp tang of lemony antiseptic hung in the air, as though someone had just cleaned out a refrigerator.

   Dr. Ryan Colson, the coroner, stood beside one of the tables, his blue scrubs looking shockingly bright against the dull metal. The soft lights made his black hair and goatee gleam like wet ink against his ebony skin, and his dark hazel eyes were kind and sympathetic behind his round silver glasses.

   “Dr. Colson.”

   “Please,” he said. “Call me Ryan.”

   “Okay, Ryan. But only if you call me Gin.”

   He nodded. “Gin.”

   My gaze flicked past him to the table. Elissa’s body had already been stretched out on the metal, with a blue sheet draped over everything but her face and her toes, whose nails were painted a fun, flirty pink. My stomach turned over again.

   “I haven’t started my official autopsy yet, but the causes of death are pretty obvious,” Ryan said in a low, somber voice. “Blunt-force trauma to the head, face, and torso, along with manual strangulation. One of the blows to the head probably knocked her out before the strangulation occurred. That’s my hope, anyway.”

   He reached out and rested his hand on the table beside Elissa’s head, almost as if he were trying to comfort her, even though she was far beyond anyone’s reach now.

   “It’s a bit hard to tell with the cold weather, but I’d estimate that she’s been dead at least twenty-four hours. I’ll know more when I do the full autopsy, but that’s not why you’re here.”

   I shook my head. “I wish none of us were here tonight.”

   A sharp knock sounded on the door, and we turned toward the frosted glass. Ryan went over and opened the door. Jade stood in the waiting room, with Sophia hovering behind her.