“Well I think you’re right about her burned hair being related to this.” Marino cranes his neck looking up at the black iron lantern again. “But if the lamp malfunctioned as she was riding by? Wouldn’t you also expect her to have cuts from flying glass?”

“That’s a good point, and I can only say I’ve not yet seen any injuries like that.” I think about how low Elisa Vandersteel might have been as she was riding by.

The lightweight hybrid has a small aluminum frame, low-rise handlebars, and a gel seat that I estimate would be approximately four feet off the ground were the bicycle upright. When she rode through the Yard she was bent over but not tucked into a racing position. I estimate the lantern would have been at least seven feet above her head when the lightbulbs exploded out the open door.

“The greater the mass, the greater the velocity,” I’m explaining this to Marino. “And the bigger pieces, the shrapnel, would have flown over her head. But powder wouldn’t travel far. It would drift down. That’s assuming she was on her bicycle at the time, and I’m not seeing anything to make me think she wasn’t,” I add. “All of this is hypothetical. But it’s significant that there’s glass in her hair. It couldn’t have landed on her where she is now.”

“Nope. There’s nothing over there because all the glass blew that way.” He points in the general direction of the Kennedy School. “So we really don’t think she was grabbed off her bike.” He looks at me, and it’s a good sign that he’s started using the word we. “We’re thinking there was no assailant—that she was just riding through the park and got zapped by a faulty lamp or heat lightning or something crazy like that.”

“It’s a possible scenario,” I reply. “I don’t see any sign of a physical confrontation.”

“Then we’re not calling this a homicide. Are we calling it anything when people ask?”

“It’s undetermined for now. The less said the better.”

“That’s for damn sure. But to throw her ten feet like she was shot out of a cannon? All I can say is there must have been a hell of a lot of force. And I guess her helmet ended up even farther away than that because it’s lightweight.”

“And because possibly the chin strap wasn’t fastened.” I tell him when I saw Elisa Vandersteel ride across Quincy Street toward the Harvard Yard, the strap was dangling.

“Shit,” he says. “Well that answers that.”

“We’ll know a lot more when it’s determined exactly what happened to the lamp,” I reply. “It won’t be fun if you have to dig up the entire thing and haul it to the labs.”

“Done it before. Will do it again.”