He hasn’t stopped talking about his ex-wife in all the years they’ve been apart, which is at least twenty. Doris was his high school sweetheart, an uncomplicated woman, long-suffering until she wasn’t anymore and ran off with another man. I know Marino hasn’t gotten over her. I just hope he doesn’t finally do it now because of my sister, and I try to block out what Benton said at the Faculty Club.

I secure the bags at the wrists and ankles with masking tape, making sure no evidence is added or lost during the trip to my headquarters.

“Now what?” Marino says at the sound of male voices outside the entrance of the tent.

I turn around as Velcro rips, and it’s Investigator Barclay again, poking his head inside.

“You need anything?” he calls out.

“Yeah as a matter of fact, Clay?” Marino yells back. “I need you to stop coming in here and asking us that!” He rolls his eyes, and slowly shakes his head.

He waits until Barclay is gone to ask about the “freaky pattern” we sometimes see in lightning strikes, usually on a victim’s chest or back. It reminds him of flying over the Low Country in Lucy’s helicopter, he says. All those tidal creeks branching out everywhere through the salt marshes and mud flats, and what Marino refers to is arborization.

Also called Lichtenberg figures, it’s the peculiar reddish pattern a lightning strike often leaves on the surface of the skin. If you don’t know what you’re looking at it’s a freakish sight, and what causes it isn’t completely understood. A good possibility is capillaries rupturing along the path the electric discharge takes through the body. And Elisa Vandersteel doesn’t have a hint of this.

What bothers me more is if she were struck in her back and a thousand volts passed through the gold pendant, stopping her heart, then where’s the exit? Lightning is predictable and it’s not. It’s as if it has a mind of its own, as if it’s alive. It wants to race to the ground like some wild beast burrowing, and it’s not uncommon to find an exit burn on the bottom of a victim’s foot.

She doesn’t have that either, nothing but dirt on her socks. There’s not an exit anywhere I can find, and I tell Marino I’d like to see the pendant Anya and Enya picked up. He walks back to his big scene case.

PAPER RATTLES AS I open what looks like a plain brown grocery bag, and I work it over the hair, the entire head, all the way to the base of the neck, using more masking tape. I tear it with my gloved hands instead of using a blade.