At 8:12, the wall still held only the dead.
Mara Keene preferred it that way.
Not the dead, of course. *Preferred* belonged to a category of thought she would not have tolerated in a report. What she preferred was clarity. Six magnetic frames on room 4B’s whiteboard, five identification portraits and, in the middle of the lower row, the older photograph of Kara Bloom, twenty-six, missing for nine years. Beneath each face, a strip of paper: name, date, last verified location. Nothing else.
Trainees tended to fill the blanks. Arrows, adjectives, verbs circled in red. Mara made them erase them.
“If the board explains the case to you,” she said, “it’s already lying.”
Eli Navarro, standing behind her with two coffees, pushed the door with his foot.
“You should have that printed on mugs.”
He placed his by the keyboard and held out hers. Mara did not take it immediately. She was studying Kara’s photograph. Dark bangs, a smile too broad for an official driver’s-license picture, a mole to the left of her mouth. For nine years, newspapers had used the same photograph. In time, the smile had become a feature of the file, like her Honda’s mileage or the time of her last call.
“The Blacksburg report?” Mara asked.
“Arrived at six forty. They finally checked the toll.”
This time she took the coffee.
“And?”
“Haskins wasn’t there.”
Mara turned.
Navarro did not sound pleased. It was worse. He sounded like someone setting a fragile object on a table and leaving you to decide whether to break it.
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.