I like something I can remove easily once the body is on the table in the autopsy room. A hair, a fleck of paint, a fiber, DNA—it could be anything. I’ll move heaven and earth not to lose or contaminate it. But if one doesn’t understand my reasoning, what I’ve just done looks like an appalling way to treat a dead body. It’s what Marino calls a whack and sack. That’s your reward for getting hit by a train, killed in a plane crash, for being murdered. Dr. Death comes along and bags your pieces and parts like trash collected along the highway, according to him.

At least I repositioned her arms from straight up over her head to down by her sides so we can fit her into a final bag, the biggest one, a body pouch, and I’m reminded that death and dignity don’t belong in the same sentence. Opening drawers in my scene case, I find a sterile needle, and then Marino is back. I recognize the thickly contoured gold skull with its deep-set blackened eyes and gap-toothed grin.

I feel the weight of it inside its labeled bag, noting that the pendant doesn’t look damaged, just dusty. I touch the needle to it through clear plastic and feel the faint magnetic tug.

“It must be gold-plated steel or there’s some other alloy present. Gold is an excellent conductor of electricity but it wouldn’t get magnetized unless it’s not pure.” I return the bag to Marino, and my fatigue is on its way to crushing.

I don’t feel very good. I should take a break but there’s not time.

“If it was lightning,” Marino counters, “how come I didn’t hear any thunder around here late this afternoon or early evening? You can’t have lightning without thunder.”

What he says is true because lightning causes thunder. One can’t exist without the other. I propose that we might not detect so much as a rumble if the storm is twenty or thirty miles from here. We might not have a clue there’s anything to worry about as we step outdoors for a walk, a swim, a game of golf. But a flash of lightning can travel a great distance from the storm generating it.

“That’s where we get the expression a bolt out of the blue.” My tongue is making sticky sounds as I talk. “And when you look at a chaotic scene like this you can understand people coming up with such ridiculous things as an act of God or spontaneous human combustion. When what they probably were dealing with was a damn lightning strike.” I’m beginning to get irritable, to have sharp corners. “It would have been especially confusing if the nearest storm was many miles away, having already moved through.”