The post office in High Peaks opened at nine. She had twenty minutes. She pulled out of her parking spot and headed south on Main Street with the boxes shifting in the bed every time she hit a bump. The morning was clear and the mountains were sharp against the sky and the town was waking up the way small towns do, slowly, reluctantly, one open sign at a time.
Her phone rang through the truck's speakers. McKenzie.
"Where are you?"
"Heading to the post office. What's up?"
"You'll want to skip that. We've got a body at Round Lake."
Callie's hands tightened on the wheel. "Round Lake? Off 73?"
"Aye. Just off the southern shore. Two kids found it while they were out fishing. You should see the state of them. I don't think they'll be casting a line for a while."
"I'm ten minutes out."
"Take your time. Whoever it is, they aren't going anywhere."
She turned the truck around at the next intersection and headed for Route 73.
Round Lake sat in a depression between two wooded ridges about six miles south of High Peaks. It was small as Adirondack lakes went, maybe a quarter mile across, fed by a creek on the north end and drained by another on the south. In summer it drew swimmers and kayakers. In the shoulder seasons it drew fishermen and the occasional hiker who wandered off the trail and ended up at the water's edge wondering how they'd gotten there. It was not a place where bodies turned up.
Callie saw the cruisers before she saw the lake. Three of them parked along the gravel pull-off where a boat launch sloped down to the water. Yellow tape was already up, strung between trees and the metal posts of a sign that read NO MOTORIZED WATERCRAFT. A small crowd had gathered on the far side of the tape, a mix of concerned residents and curious onlookers that materialized at crime scenes the way clouds formed before a storm. Some had coffee. One had a dog.
She parked behind the last cruiser and got out. The air off the lake was cold and carried the smell of wet stone and algae and something else underneath it that she recognized before she was conscious of recognizing it.
McKenzie was standing near the waterline with his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked up when she approached.
"Morning, Thorne."
"What have we got?"
"Nothing good." He jerked his chin toward the shoreline. "Washed up against the rocks on the south end. Couple of teenagers were out in a rowboat at first light. Thought it was a deer at first. Wish it was."
Callie ducked under the tape and followed the shoreline. Two officers were standing near a cluster of rocks where the bank jutted out into the water. Between the rocks, half submerged, half resting against the stone, was a body.
She stopped three feet away. The face was destroyed. Swollen and misshapen, the features caved in on themselves, the bone structure underneath wrong in a way that made it impossible to read as a face at all. The skin was pale and waterlogged, pulled tight in some places and loose in others, and the cold water had given everything a gray, waxy quality that made it hard to tell what was damage and what was the lake's doing. Hair was present but matted and tangled with lake debris, impossible to determine the original color with certainty. The clothing was intact, stretched and sodden, clinging to the frame. She couldn't say with certainty whether it was male or female.
She looked at the hands. They were wrong too. Swollen and discolored, the skin mottled dark in patches, the fingertips bloated and soft. If there had been prints there, they wouldn't be getting them now.
"How long?" she asked.
"That's above my pay grade. Water's been cold though. That could slow things down or mess with the timeline. ME will have to work it out." McKenzie came up beside her. "Fingerprints are a wash, literally. And dental might be the only route to an ID given the state of the face. If the ME can get to it today."
“Where are the teens?”
"They're sitting in the back of Grady's cruiser looking like they've aged ten years in the last hour." He paused. "Just waiting on the coroner to show up."
Callie crouched near the water's edge and studied the body without touching it. Up close, the damage to the face was worse than it had looked from three feet. Not just swelling. The structure underneath was broken. She couldn't tell if that was impact with rocks in the water, or something else, or both. The cold had preserved the skin's surface well enough to make everything ambiguous. The water could explain a lot. Or it could be hiding what actually happened.
She heard the sound of tires on gravel behind her. The crunch of a heavy vehicle taking the turn slowly. She looked over her shoulder. Noah's Bronco pulled in behind her truck. He got out and walked toward the tape with his sunglasses on and a coffee in his hand.
McKenzie glanced at Callie. "Didn't expect him back from Indiana so soon. Man doesn't rest, does he?"
"He does not," Callie said.
Noah ducked under the tape and walked down to the shoreline. He looked at the body. Then at Callie. Then at McKenzie.
"Who found the body?”
