“Possibly. But doesn’t it still have to go to the medical examiner?” Suddenly she turned, her head cocked. “What’s all that commotion?”

Lincoln flushed. Doreen was shouting in her cell again, letting fly a fresh torrent of abuse. “Damn you, Lincoln! You jerk! You liar! Damn you to hell!”

“It sounds like somebody doesn’t like you very much,” said Claire.

He sighed and pressed his hand to his forehead. “My wife.”

Claire’s gaze softened to a look of sympathy. It was apparent she knew about his problems. Everyone in town did.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Hey, loser!” Doreen yelled. “You got no right to treat me like this!”

With deliberate effort, he redirected his attention to the thigh bone. “How old was the victim, do you think?”

She picked up the femur and turned it over in her hands. For a moment she held it with quiet reverence, fully aware that this broken length of bone had once supported a laughing, running child. “Young;’ she murmured. “I would guess under ten years old.” She lay it on the desk and stared down in silence.

“We haven’t had any missing children reported recently;’ he said. “The area’s been settled for hundreds of years, and old bones are always turning up. A century ago, it wasn’t all that unusual to die young.”

She was frowning. “I don’t think this child died from natural causes,” she said softly.

“Why do you say that?”

She reached over to turn on his desk lamp, and held the bone close to the light.

“There,” she said. “It’s so crusted over, you can barely see it through the dirt.”

He reached in his pocket for his glasses-another reminder of the years’ passage, of his youth slipping away. Bending closer, he tried to see what she was pointing at. Only when she’d scraped away a clot of dirt with her fingernail did he see the wedge-shaped gash.

It was the mark of a hatchet.