and, as usual, it came out of her in naughty ways.

“Honey, I got a whole lot better than that,” he said with a smile. He took a clear bottle full of viscous liquid off the shelf, and she watched him mix her a drink. His arms were covered in tattoos.

He smiled, and she noticed he had on mascara and a sweep of purple eye shadow. Which was more makeup then she was wearing at the moment. Interesting. Maybe he was gay or bi? Lucy decided there was only one way to be sure.

“I’ve never slept with a man wearing makeup before,” she said. Might as well get an answer to the gay question before she got too far along in her flirting.

“What makes you think we’re going to sleep together?”

“What makes you think we’re not?”

Gil had been on scene for only a few minutes when Liz Hahn pulled up in the medical investigator van. Liz, from Ocean Grove, New Jersey, had moved to Santa Fe with her partner, Shelly. They had two kids, one of whom was in the same grade as Therese.

Liz called, “Hey,” over to Gil by way of a greeting. She stopped short of approaching the ashes and instead looked around. She flipped open a notebook and scribbled a few quick notes about the initial scene. She took a camera out of the duffle bag she was carrying and snapped a picture of the mountains as they became tinged with pink, then wrote down the time: 7:10 A.M. “Shelly is a sucker for sunrise shots,” she said before turning the camera to the ashes, clicking away for a good minute.

She went closer to the ashes, carefully crouching down next to the skull. She stared and wrote in her pad, then stared and wrote some more before taking another round of photos. She went back to her truck and got out a small hand rake, which she used gingerly on the ashes for a few minutes, before getting up and going over to the Protectores. Gil heard her ask them how they found the skull and when. They told her the same thing they told Gil—that they had been there all night, they stopped raking the ashes as soon as they saw it, and no one had touched anything since.

Liz looked over to Gil for confirmation, and he gave a nod of his head. She went back to the ashes. This time Gil joined her with his notebook, knowing that this was how Liz liked to work: first, get a clear idea of the scene; second, get as much information about the scene as possible; then lastly grab the nearest detective and formulate a theory. Gil liked the method. He always left with a good idea of what Liz was thinking. Not all investigators were so polite. A few actually forbade all people on the scene from talking and left without revealing a thing.

Liz gently poked at the skull with the tip of her capped pen before saying, “Obviously it’s a child. My guess is somewhere around one or two years old. I’ll have a better idea when we look at the skull in the lab.”

“Cause of death?” he said, scribbling in his notebook in his own shorthand.

“It’s hard to say, but let me show you this.” She tipped the skull over slightly to reveal something stuck on the bottom. It was a mass of swirled red, green, and blue gunk with wire and metal pieces frozen in it. “This stuff covers the whole back side. It looks like melted plastic. We’ll have to get that off before we can get a good look.”

“So you can’t even say it’s a homicide?”

“No. It could just be nothing more than improper disposal of a body. Who knows?”

“Boy or girl?”

“No idea,” she said, letting the skull fall back into place.

“I’m guessing the kid didn’t die in the fire.”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t seen any other bones that would indicate the whole body was here. Also, I don’t see any organic material here,” she said as she poked at the ash with her pen. “So the decomposition took place somewhere else and just the skull was dumped here.”

Gil nodded and asked, “Any way to know how long the kid’s been dead?”

She made a noise that could have meant yes or no. “The skull doesn’t look very brittle,” Liz said. “So my initial guess is, not that old, but the fire . . .” She looked up at the metal frame that