“Both bones?” Gianna asked. “Possibly from the same incident?”

“I’ll take a closer look, but they’re in the same location and demonstrated the same amount of repair. They’re old, nearly smooth in their healing.”

“Clothing?” asked Nora.

“Jeans, flannel shirt, long-underwear-type shirt, heavy winter jacket. All from Eddie Bauer. Same with the boots.”

“All from the same store?” Gianna wrinkled her forehead. “That’s odd. Right?” She looked at Chris and the medical examiner. “Or do some men do all their shopping in one store?”

“Whatever’s fastest,” stated Chris. Dr. Rutledge nodded in agreement.

“Must be a man thing,” said Gianna, looking to Nora for confirmation.

She nodded, but found the fact as curious as Gianna. Had the victim suddenly needed winter clothing and bought it all at once? Did the fact that Eddie Bauer had a large mail-order business indicate that the victim avoided stores? Or was the victim from an area where clothing stores weren’t readily available?

Or did it mean nothing at all . . . simply a man who shopped the fastest way he knew how?

“Do you have the medallion he was wearing?” Gianna asked.

“Yes.” Dr. Rutledge walked back over to where his assistant was stitching up the long incisions the medical examiner had made during the autopsy. He grabbed a small silver tray from an adjacent table and brought it back to the group. The three of them leaned forward for a closer look.

The medallion’s gold-colored chain was heavy and thick. It reminded Nora of an ancient foreign coin, and she wondered if it was real gold. She suspected so. Something about the quality of the piece told her that someone had spent a lot of money. With relief she noticed the jewelry hadn’t been cleaned. Possibly she could find fingerprints that would reveal the victim’s identity if he’d been arrested in the past. Maybe she’d get lucky and he’d be local. Swirling loops covered the medallion in a raised pattern. To Nora it looked like it’d been designed with one of the old Spirograph sets. She and her brothers had spent hours with the small plastic disks and colored pens, trying to outdo one another’s designs.

“Can you turn it over?” Gianna asked.

Dr. Rutledge produced a pair of long-handled tweezers and the medallion clanged in the metal tray. More swirly patterns shone through the dusty ash that clung to the metal.

“Are those initials?” Chris muttered.

“Yes,” whispered Gianna. “GDM.”

Nora looked sharply at the petite doctor. She’d gone pale and Nora had the feeling that she’d fully expected to recognize the pattern when she’d asked Dr. Rutledge to flip it over. “You know who this belongs to?”

“It belongs to me,” she said quietly.

“It’s a very masculine-looking piece,” said Detective Hawes. Her stare made Gianna feel like Gianna herself had pulled the trigger that had killed the man on the silver table. “Why didn’t you say it was yours when you saw it in the pictures?”

“I didn’t know,” said Gianna. “I didn’t recognize it then. I knew it felt familiar but didn’t know why. It wasn’t until sixty seconds ago that I remembered.”

How did my necklace end up around the neck of a dead man?

The thought ricocheted through her head.

Who is he?

“Why?” asked Hawes, her green eyes as penetrating as lasers. “How could you not recognize your own jewelry? Was it missing from your break-in?”

“No.” Gianna’s heart pounded faster as she tried to unscramble her brain. Both Dr. Rutledge and Chris were watching her with the same intensity, and her mouth dried up. “I haven’t seen it in ages. It was mine as a child. A gift from my maternal grandmother. I haven’t seen it since . . . since my parents died. We’d always thought it’d been lost in the mess of clearing out their house after their deaths. I really don’t remember it that well . . . I got to wear it or see it only on special occasions. My mother always kept it in her things and promised I’d have it once I was older.”

“So you’re not positive that this is the same medallion. It could just be something similar.”

Gianna looked back in the metal tray. “This is it. I know it is.”

Doubt raced across Detective Hawes’s features.

“This man must have known you somehow,” Hawes said. “And you know we need an identification on him as soon as possible. Nothing else about him prompts any memory?”

Gianna stepped closer to the table. In the cabin there’d been little to indicate his age without further investigation. The victim’s face was half-gone, his hair burned away. His lips had curled back and burned away, exposing his teeth. His torso had been well protected from the flames by his clothing and seemed unnaturally white compared to what was left of his face.

Something has to be familiar.

Nothing about him stirred a memory.

“No.”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry, I truly don’t know who he is.”

Hawes nodded in acceptance, her eyes slightly sad. “I’ll start looking in other ways. We’ll figure it out.” She turned a curious gaze to the body. “I bet it’s going to be a fascinating story.”

Gianna felt like she’d let the detective down.

“The chain on the medallion is different,” said Gianna, searching for something helpful to add. “I remember it being thinner . . . it was one of those square-shaped chains. A box chain. I remember running it between my fingers over and over, fascinated with the movement of the chain more than the medallion. I always thought the medallion was boring even though my initials were on it.”