When I turn the body a little more I’m surprised by what at first looks like a necrotic tattoo.

“What the hell?” Marino says.

“Her pendant,” it dawns on me.

CHAPTER 31

THE BURN IS SHAPED like a skull.

“You can see the face. Well almost,” I show Marino as we change our gloves, and we have a red biohazard trash bag full of soiled ones by now. “You can make out an eye and part of the grin, at any rate.”

“Was she wearing the necklace backward when you ran into her?” He blots sweat on his chin with a paper towel, careful not to drip anywhere important, including the body.

“I wouldn’t think so because I noticed the gold pendant was a skull with a whimsical face.”

“Then it had to be turned over when it burned her, and it had to be inside her shirt so it was directly against her skin.” He states what he wants to be true.

Marino doesn’t want to think anything that might feed into his phobia of things that creak, groan and go clank in the night. He’s getting spooked. I would expect as much after today, and it seems far from over.

“If you saw an injury like this and had no idea?” He goes on and on about it. “In the Salem days this would get you hung as a witch. They’d say it had to be a witch who zapped this person, and you’d better hope you never gave whoever it was the evil eye.”

“Well fortunately we don’t live in those days. But you’re right. I probably would have been hanged as a witch.” I pick up my hand lens, and he takes close-up photographs of the burn.

Dry and dark reddish brown, the partial impression of the skull’s grinning face was caused by sparing when the metal pendant got extremely hot. The debossed or depressed mouth and an eye weren’t in contact with skin, and those areas aren’t burned. They’ve remained pale, explaining what looks somewhat like a grotesque emoji in the middle of Elisa Vandersteel’s upper back. Even I would be the first to say that it’s bizarre.

“It looks like a dead head.” Marino’s eyes race around. “Like something supernatural, like a stigma.”

He means a death’s-head and a stigmata, and the burn only looks like that if one knows what caused it.

“Can you help me hold her please?” Sweat runs down my chest, my belly, between my thighs, and the scrubs under my coveralls are soaking wet.

Squatting across from me, Marino steadies the body as I turn it completely on one side to give me a better look from head to toe, front and back.