No Mark Upon Her

Police Station. Singla had set up a whiteboard for notes and a corkboard for the crime-scene photos, and a conference table had begun accumulating the inevitable piles of paper.
    Singla already looked harried, his suit more rumpled than the day before, and the constables—one female, one male—looked anxious, as if they’d been on the receiving end of Singla’s ire. The male constable was taking phone calls, and from what Kincaid overheard, it sounded as if he was fielding the press.
    “Superintendent,” Singla said, his tone slightly disapproving, as if they were late for a class. “We’ve a preliminary report from the forensics team at the boat. They’ve found a streak of pink paint on the underside of the hull. It looks like transfer from the blade of a Leander oar, but there doesn’t seem to be any damage to the oar remaining with the boat. There’s also some crazing in the hull’s fiberglass that appears to radiate from the paint streak. Possibly point of impact.”
    Kincaid glanced at Cullen. “Could she have done that herself?”
    “I can’t see how,” Cullen answered, frowning. “Although—if she tipped, and her oar came loose . . .” Walking over to the corkboard, he studied the photos, as if the body snagged below the weir might tell him something. “I suppose if the current was sweeping her away, she could have used the oar to try to capture the shell . . . The first thing rowers are taught is never to leave the boat. A rowing shell floats unless it’s really badly damaged.”
    “Any sign of the missing oar?” Kincaid asked.
    Singla ran his hand across his scalp, separating the thinning strands of his hair. “Not yet. It could be anywhere. Forensics is working on a paint match from the remaining oar.”
    “Anything else? Any evidence of a struggle along the bank?”
    “No.” Singla looked pained, as if he took the failure personally.
    Turning to Cullen, Kincaid asked, “How hard a blow would it take to shatter a fiberglass hull?”
    “These days most hulls are reinforced with Kevlar. But still, they’re fragile, and brittle, and they do get damaged often enough. I rowed into a bridge abutment once at school. It was an old training shell, but the coach was not happy.”
    Kincaid couldn’t stifle a grin. “You rowed into a bridge?”
    “You are going backwards, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Cullen said, sounding offended. “Some rowers develop a really annoying habit of constantly looking over their shoulder. Slows them down. Others just aim the boat and hope for the best.”
    “I take it you belonged to the second group.”
    Cullen ignored this quip. “If you know the course well, which Becca Meredith would have done, you learn to navigate by landmarks.”
    “What about the cottage?” Kincaid asked Singla. “Anything there?”
    “Nothing that seems out of the ordinary. The calls on her home phone seem to correlate with the ex-husband’s account. He left a message at approximately the time Milo Jachym saw her take the boat out, as well as several messages later in the evening and the following morning.”
    “He could have rung from anywhere,” Kincaid said thoughtfully. “He could have been checking to see if she’d taken the boat out. What about her mobile? Was it in the house?”
    “In her handbag.” Singla nodded towards a polyethylene bag among the papers on the table. “I had the duty constable bring her personal effects. But we don’t know her voice mail password.”
    “Maybe Mr. Atterton will be able to enlighten us. But meanwhile . . .” Kincaid pulled a chair out from the table, sat, opened the bag, and took out the phone. It was a sophisticated model, one he’d expect a senior officer to carry. But when he touched the screen, the wallpaper that appeared was a service provider’s stock picture.
    Intrigued, he checked the phone’s photo files and found nothing. “Odd. She had no pictures stored on her phone.” He tried another application. “Nor did she use her calendar.”
    Quickly, he scrolled through her e-mails and text messages, but they all seemed to be work-related, except for a text message from Freddie Atterton sent at approximately the time she’d gone out in the boat, saying, Ring me!!!! I talked to Milo . The phone also showed two voice mails, but he couldn’t retrieve them. There was no visual voice mail.
    He checked her contact list—short, which by now didn’t surprise him. Going through it would be a job for Doug, but at