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“Sir, there was a body found down the street a few blocks, at a construction site. Female African American. She’s been badly mutilated, and I’m sorry, Dr. Cross, but your wife’s badge and ID are there as well. Is your wife here?”
    I almost collapsed right there, but I grabbed the doorjamb and choked out, “She’s missing.”
    “Missing?” the detective said. “Since …”
    “Just take me there,” I said. “I need to see this for myself.”
    It was a two-minute ride, which I spent in a near catatonic state. Aaliyah kept asking me questions, and I kept saying, “I need to see her.”
    There were patrol cars ahead, and yellow tape, familiar things in my life, but I got no solace from them. I have entered murder scenes too many times to count, but I have never been as frightened of what I was about to see as I was that morning, walking next to Aaliyah, past a patrolman and through a gate in a chain-link fence that blocked off the construction site.
    “She’s in the bottom, sir,” Aaliyah said.
    I walked to the edge and looked down into the hole dug for the foundation.
    Crushed stone and rebar filled the bottom of the excavation, ready for cement. A woman of Bree’s height, build, and hairstyle lay on her right side, her back to me. Streams of dried blood caked her skin from scores of oval wounds to her entire dorsal side. She was wearing the same bra and panties Bree had been wearing on Good Friday. And that was Bree’s watch.
    I staggered a step closer to the edge, felt bolts of lightning go off in my head, and thought for certain I was going to fall in there with her. But Detective Aaliyah grabbed hold of my elbow.
    “Is it her, Dr. Cross?” she asked. “Bree Stone?”
    I stared at her dumbly, then said, “I have to go down.”
    We went to a ladder, and how I climbed down it, I’ll never know. Every step broke my heart. Every handhold was my last.
    I stepped through the crisscrossed rebar and around the front, seeing that the earrings were definitely the same ones I’d given Bree on our anniversary.
    An alien moan came up out of my gut.
    Taking another step, I saw that her face had been beaten beyond recognition, and that the wounding pattern had continued down the front of her body, as if someone had used garden clippers to snip off ovals of her skin every five or ten inches of her entire body, right out to the engagement ring I’d given her and her wedding band, right out to bloody stumps where the tips of her fingers should have been. Her mouth was open, and her teeth were missing.
    “Oh, dear Jesus,” I whispered in shock, sinking to my knees in front of her. “What has that sick bastard Mulch done to you?”

CHAPTER
6
     
    “IS IT YOUR WIFE, DR. CROSS?” Detective Aaliyah asked.
    I stared at the desecrated body lying there before me, saw the hair, the skin color, the height, the weight, the jewelry, and said, “I don’t know. I think so, but I don’t know for certain. She’s … she’s unrecognizable like this.”
    “Where were you last night?” she asked.
    Scanning the body for something, anything, that said definitively whether it was Bree or not, I replied, “I was home, Detective, watching reruns of
The Walking Dead
.”
    “Sir?”
    “The television show about the zombie apocalypse,” I said. “My boy Ali loves it.”
    “And he was there with you?”
    I shook my head again, felt tears trickle from my eyes, and said, “He’s gone too. They’re all gone. My entire family. Haven’t they told you? John Sampson? Captain Quintus? The FBI?”
    “FBI?” she said. “No, I caught this on my way to work, but why don’t we get out of here, let forensics do their job, and you tell me what I need to know.”
    I knelt there for several more moments, staring at the body and seeing images of my life with Bree playing in the air, making it all surreal and soul killing.
    “Dr. Cross?”
    I nodded, got wobblingly to my feet, and managed to climb back up the ladder without