I’ll do this before anything else, and I return to the body. Kneeling close with a sterile disposable scalpel, I get a whiff of decomposition and another odor that’s most noticeable near her head. The stench from blood breaking down is mixed with something else, and I try to isolate what it is.

“I’m smelling something acrid,” I say to Marino as dark red blood oozes from the tiny buttonhole incision I make.

“I don’t smell anything.” He looks away as I push in the long thermometer.

Marino’s not squeamish until he is. Then some things really bother him. I reposition myself closer to Elisa Vandersteel’s head to find the source, getting down on my knees, leaning close to look carefully.

“Not me,” Marino says. “All I smell is rotting blood.”

“This.” I show him singed hair near her neck and right jaw.

“Shit. I swear you’re part bloodhound.”

I also notice tiny fragments of glass. They shine like grains of sand in her disarranged ponytail, but I see nothing like that on her clothing, skin or adhering to the dried reddish-brown blood in her right ear.

“So maybe she has a head injury,” Marino says as he follows where I’m touching and looking. “That can make you bleed out of your ears.”

“It depends on what type of head injury.”

“How about one caused by a gun?” he proposes, and he’s not being funny. “We don’t know that she wasn’t shot.” His eyes are hidden by his camera again as he takes more photographs. “We’ve sure as hell seen our share of cases where you don’t know they’ve been shot until you get them to the morgue.”

“At the moment we don’t know much,” I agree, and I have little doubt that at this early stage of things Marino wishes the victim had been blasted with a shotgun, had a knife in her back or an ax buried in her head.

Then he’d know exactly what he’s dealing with, and most of all he wants to work the case because he’s already working it. It’s natural to want to fit facts with a gut feeling, and that’s the problem I routinely face because it’s hard for cops to back off. There’s no conquest, commendation or adrenaline rush if Elisa Vandersteel died from natural causes or an accident.

“She could have been shot.” Marino doesn’t stop but he will eventually. “And if you were shot in the ear at close range you could get burned hair from the muzzle flash.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s not what we’re seeing.” I study wisps and stubble that remind me of melted nylon as I think about what Anya and Enya said they noticed when they were close to the body.