I busy myself with my scene case, finding clear plastic and brown paper bags. I gather rolls of masking tape, Sharpies, and a gunshot-primer-residue collection kit I use when traces of debris are destined for the CFC’s powerful electron microscopes. Changing my gloves, I return to the body. I kneel by her head, and in the intense illumination of the auxiliary lights, my flashspun polyethylene-covered knees are bright white against the green grass.

I remove the cap from a carbon-covered metal stub. I press the adhesive side against Elisa Vandersteel’s scorched hair, collecting bits of glass, fibers, particles, anything I find. Sealing each stub inside a sterile vial, I label and initial it, prepping in the field, preparing specimens for the trace evidence lab.

This will make it easier for my chief microscopist Ernie Koppel to do the analysis when he gets to work first thing in the morning. The evidence will be waiting. It will save us time if all he has to do is sputter-coat the samples with gold. Then he’ll mount them in a chamber and vacuum it down.

PALPATING THE SCALP, I dig my fingers through Elisa Vandersteel’s tied-back long chestnut hair. Gently, carefully I work my way around the curvature of her skull, and my gloves are smeared dark red.

“She’s got a wound to the back of her head,” I tell Marino, and I’m aware of the side of her face resting against my leg.

She’s as warm as life, and I feel a flutter around my heart again. It’s as if I’ve been touched by the breath of God, reminded of what I’m dealing with, and I steady myself. I can’t have a personal reaction right now, and I move blood-crusted hair out of the way to measure the laceration with a small plastic ruler.

The injury is not quite two inches in length over the occipital bone. I tell Marino that the laceration was caused by skin splitting as a result of blunt-force trauma, and this likely is the source of most of the blood we’re seeing.

“Possibly from striking her head on the hard-packed path,” I add.

“And the reason there’s blood under her back is because she was dragged and that’s where it ended up.” Marino is looking down at Elisa Vandersteel’s feet with their light gray-and-white-striped bicycle socks. “And we can account for how that happened. We know who did that much at least.”

He takes more photographs of marks in the dirt that are no more than six inches long, terminating at the back of the heels. The girls didn’t pull her very far in their effort to get her out of harm’s way. They didn’t succeed if their goal was to make sure she didn’t get run over, as they put it.