If only you could speak, I always think. She will in her own way and in her own time. The language of the dead is silent and difficult, and the message I keep getting is Elisa Vandersteel looks remarkably clean and uninjured. I haven’t turned her over yet, and I’ll know more when I can examine her internally. But already I feel confident that her singed hair is directly related to her death.

That doesn’t mean she’s a homicide. I believe she was killed by a predator but that doesn’t mean it was human. She may be an electrocution, and I’m scanning for any possible source of current. I’m looking around for something damaged, a shorted circuit that she could have come in contact with.

My attention continues going back to the obvious suspect, the iron lamp with its broken bulbs. I keep looking up at the sky only to be reminded that I can’t see it because of the canopy. I’m thinking about power lines and lightning, and I tell Marino that whatever singed her hair likely occurred at or around the time of her death. If she’d burned her hair at an earlier time I don’t believe we’d smell it now.

“Except I don’t smell it.” He bends close to the body, shrugging his broad shoulders.

“And I do,” I insist. “And if it’s this noticeable it probably was even stronger when Enya and Anya showed up a couple hours ago and found her.”

Marino looks at the body, and he looks all around the lighted area of the park boxed in by the tent.

“The one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is the blown-out lamp.” He comes around to the idea begrudgingly, and now we’re getting somewhere.

“That’s exactly what I’m wondering. The damage to the lamp is telling us something important,” I reply, and we start talking about power lines.

Most of them aren’t underground in Cambridge, and Marino is quick to assert that if one were down we would have found it by now.

“Probably the hard way. Or the twins would have lit themselves up,” he adds. “So tell me how it could be an electrocution, Doc? She would have had to come in contact with something electrically charged, and I’m not getting the mechanics of how it could have happened.”

He points out there are no accessible electrical panels that might have live circuits, and no cords or tools to malfunction.

“And I’m not seeing transmission wires, cables, nothing like that exposed on the ground anywhere,” he continues going down the list, and he should know.