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The cold on my back intensified, and I shivered once. The cold receded, but I knew he was still there. I didn’t say anything, though, because now I was surrounded by a whole bunch of normies who absolutely would freak out if they knew there was a ghost standing in the middle of them.

I drew in a long, slow breath, then let it out again.

The next part was going to be really rough.

* * *

I keptit together enough that I didn’t either cry or throw up during the second post-mortem, although I was absolutely freezing because I couldn’t wear a parka into the morgue, but Gregory kept touching me—back, shoulder, arm, hand. I didn’t really want him to stop, but I also did, and that just made me feel worse about watching the pain-staking and nauseating process of re-examining his body.

It paid off, though.

The FBI’s forensic pathologist, an Asian man with the surprising name of Levi Eichman, was almost infuriatingly thorough, and refused to say a damn thing as he worked and we watched. The whole room breathed a collective sigh when he recovered Gregory’s body with the sheet and stripped off some of his gear.

He turned to Olsen. “Your victim was definitely struck over the back of the head, with a blunt object of about an inch-and-a-half in width, slightly rounded. Could very well have been a crowbar.” Then his brow furrowed. “It looks like the wound was cleaned postmortem, which means that any particulate evidence that would have been there was washed away.”

“Sonofabitch,” I muttered, then flinched a little. I hadn’t meant to actually say that out loud.

“Precisely,” was the answer Eichman gave me. “If I had to guess—which I don’t like to do, but I’m not being given a lot of choice in this case—I would say that it was done deliberately and intentionally and under ideal conditions.”

“So during the autopsy,” Smith said.

“That would meet the established criteria,” Eichman answered. Which meant that it was informed speculation—it wouldn’t hold up in a court, so it wasn’t actionable, but that it seemed awfully likely that our medical examiner was right up there on the suspect list.

The dickbag.

“Just to confirm,” Smith continued. “This should have been ruled a homicide?”

Eichman nodded his head once. “The circumstances surrounding the death of the deceased, including the trauma to the skull and the twisting and uneven bruising around the ligature marks, as well as slight bruising to the knuckles all suggest a suspicious death commensurate with homicide.”

“So that’s a ‘yes’?” Smith pressed.

“I will be recording this death as suspicious, likely homicide, yes.”

I was disappointed to find that I felt more sadness than relief.

* * *

It wasa little after seven when I got back to my parents’ house, and even though I hadn’t eaten all day, I wasn’t even a little bit hungry.

I walked into the kitchen and everybody—Mom, Dad, Taavi, and Elliot—immediately looked at me. They all had empty dessert plates, and there was half a pumpkin pie in the middle of the table.

“Val, honey—”

“No thanks, Mom. I’m not hungry.” I didn’t even want to think about food. “I need a shower, though.”

I forced a smile that I knew none of them believed and made my still slow way upstairs.

I spent almost forty-five minutes in the shower, not really doing anything, just standing and hoping the heat of the water would remove the chill from my bones.

It didn’t.

When I came back to the bedroom, Taavi was there, and I was deeply grateful.

“Is Elliot staying?” I asked. I’d been told not to tell him anything about the outcome of the postmortem yet—they would, but they wanted to run a few more tests and check on the results of the evidence Smith and I had brought to Green Bay—and they needed to keep things mostly quiet.

I’d pointed out that an exhumation was hardly quiet, but Smith had mentioned that Reynolds, the corrupt ME who’d done the first autopsy on Gregory, was out visiting family and was in Michigan or Minnesota somewhere—I couldn’t remember which bordering M-state—and wasn’t likely to hear about it for at least a few days.

That didn’t mean that the other killers weren’t aware and couldn’t tell him.