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“Nothing.” He smiled.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Based upon the artistic embellishments on the coffins, I had to deconstruct the timeline. It took me some diversion to get there, but ultimately I concluded that two people distantly related to Molly Brown, the one from the Titanic, had been buried in the coffins, but their remains had been stolen.”

“Why?”

“The best we could conclude was theft of gold jewelry, but we don’t know. I was able to get some DNA, which is how I found the link to Ms. Brown. Not through the embellishments at all.”

“Where?”

“Just outside Denver.”

I searched my brain for the discovery. That would have been something I’d read about.

“Lead coffins in Colorado? I thought those were all on the East Coast.”

“Most are, but some have also been found in Michigan.”

“Really? I didn’t know.”

“How about your last case? What was it?”

“When it comes to bones, it was the most boring assignment you can imagine. I had to confirm that it was a bullet hole in an old skull. I guess the only interesting thing was that I could determine that the injury had come about sixty years ago. We managed to find a missing man but not his killer. Not yet, as far as I know.”

“I’m not a fan of loose ends.”

“The one before that, though, was interesting. I got called into Tucson. Someone found remains up on Mount Lemmon. I was called up there to take a look. By then, it was just the bones, but it didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. Female, in her late twenties, she’d been strangled to death.”

“You determined that quickly?”

“I did. The hyoid bone was broken.” I pointed to my jaw.

“Right.”

“Anyway, a woman had gone missing a year earlier and then other things fit together quickly, so I was sure I nailed down her identity shortly thereafter. I worked with the prosecutor who wanted to prosecute the ex-boyfriend but didn’t have enough evidence. I was convinced he was guilty, so I could not allow him to go free. I followed him for a few days, observed his habit of smoking cigarettes and discarding them everywhere. I grabbed a cop friend and went back up to Mount Lemmon and searched and dug and even prayed to the universe a bit for a discarded butt. We found one. Nailed the guy, who ended up confessing. You know the story, ‘She made me so mad that she made me do it.’ He was put away, though not for long enough. Still, we got him.”

“That’s great. You know that, don’t you?”

I shook my head. “No. What’s great are the people who intervene and help before abuse and murder occur.”

“Of course, but when all of that fails, justice is good too.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t being modest or humble. I loved what I did, but I truly believed that more needed to be done, that I didn’t do enough. There weren’t enough hours in the day. There were too many problems to figure out which ones to try to solve.

“Anyway …” I said.

Graham sighed. “It’s all about karma and justice, right?”

“Well—”

“I’m driven by it.”

“Yeah?”

“Justice, vengeance, you know, those sorts of things.” Graham smiled.

I smiled too, but I was tired. If vengeance was to be had anywhere this afternoon, it wasn’t going to be me serving it up. Though I got what he was saying.