The medical examiner and most of the techs had all gone home for the evening by the time I arrived at the lab. Luckily, my credentials and my badge were enough to get me through security without any external help and I found a tech familiar enough with the case to retrieve the files for me. I sat down at the nearest desk I could find, one inside a U-shape of other desks where in the center were examination tables, beakers, chemicals, monitors and anything else a proper scientist might need to conduct their examinations. I spread the contents of the file out before me, ordering them by lab reports, field examinations, chemical analysis, etc.

I stared at the tox screen for some time before moving on to the medical examiner's official report. It read like any coroner's report I had encountered before but there were additional details written by someone who seemed familiar with the work that homicide investigators were doing. The official report was there, encased professionally in the standard form required by the state, but Dr. Portia Warner had added her own notes as well, illuminating notes. She'd recorded nearly every observation she'd made, including the rate of decomposition and her own hypothesis of how far Chelsea Lucas may have floated before washing ashore as well as any freshwater plant and animal life she may have encountered along the way. Her report was interspersed not only with her own notes but with references to other lab reports as well. I had never seen such a detailed autopsy and I spent a few hours just reading through all of her notes and cross checking them with whatever else was in the file I'd been given.

I read the lab work done on everything from the victim herself to the river water collected for sample at the scene and the dirt she'd washed up onto, searching for anything that might indicate why a healthy sixteen year old girl might suffer a sudden onset of pulmonary edema. I wasn't the only one who'd asked that same question. It had been written and rewritten at least a dozen different ways in Dr. Warner's report and echoed by the work of her voracious lab techs. I had to admit they'd been thorough. It took most of the night to sift through the various reports, screenings, and examinations that Dr. Warner and her team had conducted.

As dawn broke and sunlight started to stream in through the windows, I began to feel less and less hopeful about the possibility of my stumbling onto something they had missed. I was pouring over the tox screen for the fourth time when the first of the techs entered the lab for their morning shift.

"Dr. McKinnon?" someone asked and I glanced up to see a young man I did not recognize.

"Do I know you?" I replied.

"Ah, right. You probably don't remember me. I was on the scene the day that they discovered Chelsea Lucas' body on the shore of the Potomac," he said.

"You ran the report that identified her," I recalled and he smiled and nodded.

"You remember. I'm Will Emerson. What are you doing here?"

I held up the file in explanation.

"Ah," he responded with a nod. "Checking to see if we missed anything."

"It's nothing personal," I assured him. "I do have a PhD in Chemistry so I thought it couldn't hurt to take a look."

"Right. A Doctor of Psychology and a Doctor of Chemistry. If you don't mind my asking, how did you manage that? Those two disciplines are vastly different."

"Actually, much of human behavior can be quantified as simple chemicals interacting in the brain," I answered. He smiled at the over simplicity. "Or I suppose I just like school far more than I should."

He snorted a laugh at that.

"Dr. McKinnon? What are you doing here?" someone else asked and I looked up to see Erica Daniels, the tech from the crime scene, entering the lab and looking me over with as much scrutiny as her partner had.

"Do you know when Dr. Warner usually arrives?" I asked the man I'd been speaking to, ignoring Miss Daniels' inquiry for now so that I did not have to repeat myself in such quick succession.

"Usually around now," he answered. "She should be here soon."

I nodded and turned back to my review of the reports in front of me, leaving Mr. Emerson and Miss Daniels to go off and confer about my presence in their own time. I flipped back to the beginning of the tox screen and started over again after being distracted but the time of quiet solitude I had enjoyed to this point was quickly coming to an end. More and more employees began to arrive at the lab and their morning conversations of catching up from the previous day had my head spinning in a fog of clinical observation and small talk. Once I'd been moved from the examination area to an unoccupied desk in a dark corner, I noticed the time. It was fairly late in the morning. I checked my phone. No missed calls. That was strange. As I dialed my partner's number and held the phone to my ear, I heard the clicking of a familiar medical examiner's heels against the linoleum and looked up to see her making her way over to me with a smile.

"So the rumors are true," she said in a friendly manner when she reached me and I had hung up the phone after being sent straight to voicemail. "The famous Dr. Madeline McKinnon has taken over my lab."

"Oh, no. I haven't taken over. I've been quietly studying these reports in the corner," I argued, bristling at the suggestion that I might have entered into this establishment in an authoritarian manner. "My apologies if I somehow challenged your authority. I did not mean-"

"I'm kidding, Dr. McKinnon. So, what can I do for you?"

"I've been studying these reports. They're very thorough, Dr. Warner."

She smiled, "You can call me Portia."

"I can?" I looked up at her, surprise plain on my face. She smiled at the reaction.

"Yes, you can. I prefer to interact informally with those that I work closely with and, since you're partnered up with Special Agent Parker, I imagine we will be working together with some frequency."

"You work with him a lot, then? Agent Parker?"

"Special Agent Parker," she corrected though hers was with a smile that Parker never had when he corrected me on the subject. "He said you'd been doing that to annoy him."

"He told you that? You've spoken? Outside of work, I mean."

She only looked over to me.

"Sorry," I added, realizing that I was prying. "I don't mean to be so nosy. I just... well, I've noticed that you're the only person in this entire working operation that he calls by their first name. I was... curious, I suppose."

"No apologies necessary," she told me, waving it off as if it were nothing. "Jake and I used to date."

"Ah," I nodded in understanding though there was a hint of surprise in my tone as well.

"Guess he's into blondes," she joked. It was a demoralizing joke intended to diminish her as a true possibility for companionship. It was a defense mechanism I'd noticed in several of my patients who had recently broken up with someone they cared more about than they wanted to admit.

"Or perhaps he's into incredibly beautiful and intelligent women," I countered, smiling to secure the compliment.

"Well then, you'd better be careful," she winked, deflecting.

I cleared my throat, uncomfortable.

"We were close," she rushed on. "And then it ended. Mutually. We've been friends ever since. It doesn't feel appropriate to refer to someone you've been intimate with as Special Agent so and so, don't you think?"

"I wouldn't know," I answered and then, realizing what she meant, I nodded. "I mean, I'm sure it would be. Thank you, by the way, for telling me that. You didn't have to."

"You were curious," she shrugged. "He's your partner. You're supposed to be able to rely on him for back up if anything happened. The least I can do is help you get to know the man who closes himself off to everyone around him."

"Yeah," I answered with a nod. "I've noticed that."

She gave me a sad smile and then peered over my shoulder at the reports in my hands.

"Have you found anything?" she asked.

"No," I answered with a frown. "I've been staring at these for most of the night and I've got nothing. It's the strangest thing. A perfectly healthy sixteen-year-old girl tied up and locked away. As terrible as it is, though, none of it would have killed her."

With a sigh and the realization that I wasn't going to get anything out of these files that I hadn't all night, I shut the case and handed it to Dr. Warner before standing up.

"You should go home," Dr. Warner said empathetically as she took the offered file. "You need some rest."

"Not yet," I told her with a shake of my head. "The answer is in those reports, I know it. We just need more time to find it. Maybe if we could bring Mrs. Lucas in on suspicion of child abuse, if nothing else, she might tell us something."

She nodded but didn't seem sure of my plan.

"I need to find Parker," I snapped, more harshly than I meant to in my exhaustion, "but he isn't answering his phone. You're an ex girlfriend. You have his address, right?"

She looked surprised for a moment, her jaw dropping open in surprise, but then she shook it off and nodded.

"Oh, yes," she told me. "I can text it to you."

"Thanks."

I headed for the door without another word, intent on finding my partner and getting something out of the nightmare that had been the last twelve hours.