The pungent odor hit Madison instantly upon opening the morgue doors. She pinched the tip of her nose, but it did little to save her from the smell of decomp embedding itself in her lungs and sinus cavities.

"Whoa, he's a ripe one." Terry, her partner, stepped through the doorway behind her. He grabbed for a cloth mask from the dispenser mounted on the wall and handed her one.

Cole Richards, the ME, stood by the body, looking like a tall, dark guardian. "It's the exposure to the air accelerating the putrefaction process. That's why the autopsy must be done tonight," Richards said.

Madison noted Richards talked while keeping his eyes on the dead, an unusual thing for him. Maybe something about this death touched him on a personal level? She looked from Richards to the body.

The male victim, estimated in his early twenties, lay on the metal slab, a white sheet draped over his distended abdomen to his shoulders. His skin was almost black and appeared separated from the bone, as if one could peel it off like the rind of an orange. His face, like the rest of him, was distorted and bloated beyond recognition. His eyes were open and vacant, clouded by death. His arms lay above the sheet to his sides. Some of his fingers were missing nails. The skin of one fingertip had been removed. Madison deduced Richards had taken it for identification purposes and forwarded it to the lab.

There was no wallet found on the body, nor any identifying marks to flag him in the missing person database. He'd been wearing jeans and a gray hoodie, and the only things on him were a metal card holder that was empty except for a folded-up napkin with a woman's name and number, a wad of cash, and a cell phone. He wore a gold chain with a pendant that had the letters CC engraved on it.

The body had washed up on the shore of the Bradshaw River, which ran through the city of Stiles and fed from a lake an hour away. The property belonged to a middle-aged couple, without children, by the last name of Walker. The wife had found the body when she went to get wood for their woodstove. She said he hadn't been there the day before. They had interviewed the couple at length and obtained their backgrounds, which came up with nothing noteworthy.

"How long do you estimate he was in the water?" Madison asked.

"As a simple deduction based on what is before me, I would say at least two to three weeks." Richards pulled his eyes from the body to look at Madison.

Was pain buried there?

Richards returned his gaze to the body as if he'd read her thought. "I'm basing this on when he surfaced. In cooler water, bacteria causing decomp multiplies more sluggishly. If this was a warmer season, and it was three weeks later, we'd have a skeleton. Stomach contents will provide the approximate time of his last meal and what he ate. I'll also be consulting with a friend of mine, Wayne McDermott. He's a forensic climatologist. He can provide us with recent temperatures so we can get a closer estimate for time of death."

"So, what are your thoughts? Dead when he went in, or did he drown?"

"This is still to be determined. He is young and appears to have been in excellent shape."

Madison's eyes diverted back to the body. The currents of the Bradshaw River had swept away any trace of a fit male adult. His bloated features made him appear more like a character from a sci-fi movie than a once living human being.

"Assuming he was alive when he hit the water, it is unlikely that he had a heart attack on entry. Quick results would show frothy liquid in the lungs, but because he was submerged for a considerable time, any trace of this would be gone. Tissue samples from his lungs, however, will be taken and sent to the lab for further analysis. We'll also extract bone marrow in search of diatoms." He must have clued into their confusion and added, "These are microscopic organisms that are specific to a region. If it made it to his bone marrow, he was alive when he went into the water. We could also find evidence of this in his kidneys, should this be the case. This will prove whether he drowned in the Bradshaw or was dumped in the river after death." His eyes went to the body. "We're not going to get these answers just by looking at him."

"Anything else you can tell us?" Terry asked.

"His neck is broken, but that might simply be from the trauma the body experienced as it went down the Bradshaw. I'll also require a full tox panel be run on him. We might be able to find out if he had any drugs or alcohol in his system, though it's more like a shot in the dark. If he did consume, any trace might be long gone."

Madison latched eyes with the ME. "Well, let's assume he did drown. How would we know it was homicide?"

A faint smile touched Richards's lips, exposing a slit of white teeth. "It is dubbed the perfect murder. But until we can establish his identity, concrete his background, and get the tox results back, I will not be finalizing COD on paper."

Cause of death.

"He could have jumped in. Suicide?" Terry rubbed at the back of his neck.

"Possibly, but unlikely. The reason for this is the natural tendency to surface. Drowning suicides usually involve the use of a heavy object to counteract the instinct to save oneself."

"Maybe he didn't think things through and acted on impulse. Most suicides are executed in the moment. He could have gotten caught in the current and pulled under the ice. His restraint could have broken free from the body."

"I prefer not to speculate." Richards's eyes scolded Terry. "But at this point, I would treat this case as suspicious leaning toward homicide. Look at this." He lifted the left hand of the victim.

There was a circular impression on the backside of the hand.

"Cigarette burn, or possibly something larger." She studied it and then glanced at Richards. "It's almost large enough to be a car lighter or a cigar."

Richards's eyes narrowed, pinching the dark skin around his eyes.

"So our vic was definitely in some sort of struggle before ending up in the river. But intention is going to be hard to prove."

Madison glanced at her skeptical partner. "Hard, but not impossible." She went back to Richards. "So, you don't have an ID and only a speculative conclusion as to the cause of death. Why did you call us down here?"

Richards pulled back the sheet and pointed to the victim's shoulders. "This."

There were darkened lines, a subtle contrast, the two widths a mirror image of each other, on each shoulder close to the neck.

"Bruising," Terry said.

"Yes, contusions."

"From what? What would cause something like that?" Madison asked.

"That I'll leave for you to figure out." Richards placed the sheet back over the body. "But if our guy did drown due to forcible action, these marks could have come from our murder weapon."

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