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I swallowed again, then forced myself to look at the photos, focusing on the details, not the whole picture. The grain of the belt—it was new, not old. And it definitely didn’t belong to Gregory Crane. The buckle was plain, the kind of thing you’d pick up from a Walmart or Target or Shopko. Cheap. Not a lot of bend in it, which meant they’d probably bought it just for this.

I wrote all of that down in bullet-point form.

The ligature mark around the belt suggested a struggle, but not much of one, which tracked with what Gregory had told Ward.

That, too, went on the notepad.

Gregory had been wearing a pull-over sweatshirt with a Shawano Community High Hawks logo on it, faded, the elbows starting to wear through, stains—bleached and dark—dotting the fabric. The collar of a black t-shirt was visible underneath. He had on jeans, also stained, ripped, and faded, and a pair of muddy brown work-boots, one lace dangling loose. Working-in-the-garden clothes.

They hadn’t taken his boots off, and that, for some reason, bothered me more than most of the rest of it. It’s funny, sometimes, what little detail the brain focuses on—the things it decides are justtoo wrongto countenance. Yes, the rest of the photo—as I’m sure the rest of them would be—was fucking disturbing, upsetting, all that. But the fact that Gregory Crane was wearing muddy boots in his own house, in his office,that, more than anything else, struck me as deeply, profoundly wrong.

“What happened to his clothes?” I asked Smith, then.

He left the room without a word.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I was going to get through these photos, even though they were really just more of the same, although from different angles. And, honestly, it might be better if Smith wasn’t in the room… just in case I lost it.

I tried hard not to see Gregory’s face, the contorted expression, the discoloration. The suffering that had preceded his death.

You never want to remember someone you knew dead. Alive, they were still the person you remembered. The person you cared about. Dead? Well, it was bad enough if they were makeuped and powdered and preserved in formaldehyde, looking more like a wax-works doll than the person they’d been. It was ten million fucking times worse to remember them as a murder victim.

And, sure, I’d seen Gregory’s body the morning of his funeral. But the funeral home people—God fucking love them—had somehow massaged out the rictus of murder, smoothed away some of the horror so that the man lying on the table had at least seemed to be at rest, even though it was abundantly clear he was dead.

The photos were another thing entirely. And I’d make damn fucking sure Elliot never,eversaw them.

On the fourth one, I paused. Smith had left a legit magnifying glass on the table—I didn’t even fucking know police departments stillusedmagnifying glasses, especially not the round Sherlock-Holmes-style ones—and I grabbed it to take a closer look at the image.

It wasn’t Gregory’s body that had drawn my attention.

It was something on his desk—something that absolutely hadnotbeen on his desk when I’d gone into the office a few days later.

It was a simple thing. Small. Shiny.

And, judging from the little vehicle silhouette on the side I could barely see with the magnifying glass, it was a car wash token.

Who the fuck takes a car wash token from a murder victim’s desk?

I looked up, noticing that Smith still hadn’t come back from wherever he’d gone.

Blow up token image, I wrote on the notepad.Figure out which one.

I pulled up a map on my phone and searched for car washes. There were only four that weren’t just ordinary gas stations—and of those, two were self-washes. That left Scrub-a-Dub (which also had a pet wash, which was weird) and Mrs. Bubbles.

I wrote those down, too.

I went back through the previous photos to see if there was an angle on the desk that showed the coin, even blurry, but it wasn’t there.

It did show up again in photo number six—the last one—which I was studying when Smith came back into the room carrying a cardboard filing box.

I looked up. “Is that physical evidence?”

“Including Mr. Crane’s personal effects, yes.” So Gregory’s clothes. Because he hadn’t had his wallet on him—that Elliot and I had found on his dresser, right where he always left it, complete with money and cards inside. Either because they didn’t care, or because they knew that if they took it, Gregory’s death would become suspicious.

“They didn’t find a car wash token in there, did they?”

“A what?” But he picked up the list and scanned quickly through it. “None listed.”

I handed him the fourth picture. “Look on the desk.”