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years old.”
    Her hand returned to her mouth. Swift saw that it was shaking a little, the fingers quivering, patting against her lips. “Oh no,” she said again.
    “You think you know who it might be?”
    She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
    Now he was all attention, his nerves taut. “Who?”
    “Only thirteen-year-old lives around here is from the new family.”
    “The new family?”
    “They moved into the Getty place.” She’d been looking past Swift at the scene further up the road, but Lorraine Hamilton now turned in the other direction. She pointed shakily. “Next house down.”
    The Getty place . He knew the name. An older couple, same generation as the Hamiltons, had owned the house, and both had passed within a year of each other. If he remembered correctly, their place had sat unlived in for a time. It wasn’t far away. He’d mentioned to Brittney Silas that there were a handful of homes nearby, but he’d thought the Getty place was still vacant.
    He peered into the darkness for a moment. He could see a single light in the distance, vague, obscured by the falling snow. A porch or walkway light, perhaps. He looked back at Lorraine Hamilton. “Are they home, do you know?”
    “I’m not sure. I think so. They’re a nice family. Came over and introduced themselves — the woman brought cookies.”
    “When was that?”
    Swift took out his notepad and clicked a pen.
    “Oh, a month ago, I guess. Maybe two. I’m sorry.”
    “No, it’s okay. This is very helpful. I’m sorry this is the middle of the night.”
    “I don’t sleep very well. It was after Christmas, though.”
    “So they’ve been living there for maybe two months. Got it.” Swift looked over his shoulder back at the scene in the road. The figures there were small in the distance, but he thought he could see Hal Woodruff at the center of the activity, and Brittney moving around, carefully examining every detail. The on-call mortuary service had been notified. It would arrive in the next half hour and would transport the body to the forensic pathologist in Plattsburgh. As soon as the high and mighty Ms. Silas felt ready, anyway.
    Swift didn’t know whether he should immediately go on to the decedent’s possible family home, or back to properly take control of the investigation. The body had been found on a New York State Highway, which made it a State concern, though the first-responder had been Alan Cohen, from the Sheriff’s Department. The nature of the call, however — body in the middle of the road, possibly teenager . . . witness says he saw a car speed away, not a hit-and-run though, body was already there — had been sufficient for the State Police to alert BCI Investigator Swift about a possible homicide. Swift had arrived minutes later. Now he was lead investigator and had to coordinate all those involved. He and Silas had done the walk-through, and had reassessed scene boundaries — she was willing to redirect traffic for miles; he had to do something to mitigate that. Hal Woodruff, the coroner, had checked for pulse, respiration, reflexes, and pronounced the teenager deceased, but beyond that, Woodruff was out of his depth. A homicide investigation needed to move quickly and be light on its feet. He would have to cut Hal loose and extend medico-legal jurisdiction to Brittney for now, entrust her with the chain of evidence custody.
    She would need support — documenting, photographing, collecting evidence and being responsible for it — to ensure it wasn’t tampered with, lost, stolen, or anything else. In this case, that it wasn’t swallowed up by all the damned snow. It was a lot to ask of one person. Swift knew what it was like to carry such a burden.
    Crime Scene Investigators like Brittney, who worked for the State troopers, were a relatively new addition to the proliferating law enforcement departments. When Swift had started as a State Police Detective twenty years earlier, detectives did all the leg work. He