KRISTINE

It’s autumn of 2010 and I’m standing in the exact spot where ten-year-old Kristine Mihelich was found dead as fucking winter in 1977, her newly plum-colored face a muted beacon in the freshly fallen snow off the side of a wooded cul-de-sac thirty minutes from the more slushy detritus of Detroit. It was thirty-four years ago that Kristine had been snatched, exploited like a new toy, then re-gifted to the world as a mere conjecture of what she’d been when new. A mailman had discovered Kristine on his regular route here in Franklin Village, only ten minutes from my boyhood home. He’d banked his mail truck and walked toward swaths of color off the side of the road. There was no blood at the drop...