Free The Body Reader by Anne Frasier

feet. Acting on impulse, she gently touched the back of the hand nearest her. She had the overwhelming desire to pull the girl into her arms and hug her close. Instead, she grasped her hand very gently.
    “What are you doing?” Ashby whispered loudly as he leaned over her shoulder. Gone was all evidence of the panic he’d displayed earlier.
    “Holding her hand,” Jude said.
    “Why?”
    She shrugged. “I want to.”
    “Bloody hell.” Words delivered in an exhale as he straightened away from her. “That’s enough.” He gave her a come here wave. “Up.”
    Jude didn’t move. “We should cover her with a blanket.”
    “She’s dead. She can’t feel anything. She can’t feel cold, and she can’t feel sad, and she can’t feel lonely.”
    Jude looked up at him. “I know she’s dead, but she’s telling me something.”
    Uriah squeezed his eyes shut. Seconds passed. Once he got himself under control, he zeroed back in on her. Behind him, the sky was blue as only a Minnesota sky could be, and off in the distance birds sang so cheerfully Jude could almost see the notes floating in the air.
    “You’d better be glad I’m the only one hearing what’s coming out of your mouth right now,” Uriah said.
    Their first hour of partnership was getting off to a rocky start. “I don’t think this is a suicide,” Jude said.
    “Look.” Uriah crouched next to her. With impatience masked as patience, he pulled a fold of wet fabric aside, revealing a pocket in the nightgown tangled around the body. The girl could have been one of those beautiful marble statues at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Rocks,” he said. “Her pockets are full of rocks.”
    Jude focused on the girl, experiencing the crime scene from the viewpoint of the person she was now, and not the cop she used to be. In the months since her escape, she’d struggled to ignore the heightened awareness, that bombardment of sight and sounds and odors, because those revved-up senses got in the way of everyday life. Now, though, she realized she was picking up information much in the same way she’d picked up information from Uriah, much in the same way she’d picked up information from her captor. The dead girl had a story to tell, and she was telling it to Jude.
    “Not a homicide,” Uriah said. “Not our case.” He stood and circled away from her, then returned. “Not every death is a murder. She filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the lake. Rocks. Lake.”
    “I think it was meant to look like a suicide.” Now Jude looked at him, gauging his reaction.
    “And how, after a two-minute cursory exam, did you arrive at this theory?”
    “She’s telling me things.”
    “My God.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t say that kind of nonsense out loud. She’s dead,” he said. “Dead.”
    “Yes, but what she was feeling before she died is written on her face and in her muscles. It’s still here. I see it. I can read her.”
    He let out a snort. “Anything else she’s saying?”
    Jude wanted to stroke the girl’s hair in a comforting gesture but restrained herself so as not to disturb evidence. “Fear. She was terrified before she died.” Jude knew and understood that kind of fear. That kind of fear was caused by someone else.
    “If she’s telling you so damn much, maybe she’ll give you a full name and address.”
    Jude ignored his sarcasm. It didn’t matter. The body was all that mattered. She gently placed the girl’s hand back at her side, then stood up and looked into the distance, to a curve in the lake where the sunshine made a repeated pattern on the surface of the water, to the white sails moving in a skilled dance. The day was beautiful, and that made the death even sadder.
    “Your name means light ,” she told Uriah. An odd and misplaced comment, yet the words were her attempt at momentarily shifting his attention to something else, away from his annoyance, offering a new place for his thoughts to land. She