I glance back at him, and the hulking shape of the tent looms in the dark distance behind us like a flattened thunderhead. He’s politely walking some distance away because he doesn’t want to overhear what I say. If he doesn’t hear it he doesn’t have to tell anyone, and it won’t be Benton who pulls the evidence out from under me. But he won’t stop it from happening either. That’s assuming I don’t beat his colleagues to the draw.

I’m suddenly alert and in overdrive as I explain to Anne that I need Ernie Koppel to come in right away. I’ll also require someone from the histology lab to prepare specimens for him. We’re about to be interfered with, overtaken, and if we don’t begin testing evidence immediately there’s a good chance it will all end up at Quantico, at the FBI crime labs.

We talk about this obliquely. Nothing is to be put in writing, and we’re very careful what we say over the phone. Hopefully, by the time the government makes its official requests, I’ll have done most of the analysis. I’ll have done everything I possibly can to answer questions that I worry might languish otherwise or never be asked. Elisa Vandersteel needs me to finish what I’ve started.

She deserves the best I can give her, and the first order of business will be the CT scan. I suggest to Anne that whatever left the odd linear burns might have deposited microscopic evidence in the wounds.

“Lightning wouldn’t do that.”

“You’re exactly right,” I reply. “It wouldn’t.”

“But an electrocution might.”

“And if so?” I ask her. “Electrocuted by what? What looks like lightning but isn’t? We need to find out exactly what happened to her if for no other reason than to make sure that it doesn’t happen to somebody else.”

“And while we may care about that? No one else will,” Anne says, and I know what she’s really saying.

If the evidence ends up in Quantico, we have no control over who finds out what. The Feds have their own agenda, and it’s not the same as mine.

“He’ll be autopsied in Baltimore tomorrow. Well actually today.” Benton has wandered back and slides his hand out of his pants pocket, glances at the luminescent dial glowing on his wrist. “Christ. It’s already half-past midnight. How did that happen?”

“I assume you’ve talked to Doctor Ventor or someone has.”

The chief medical examiner of Maryland, Henrik “Henry” Ventor is one of the finest forensic pathologists in the country, both of us affiliated with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, the AFMES. Briggs trained us, was our commander, our boss.

“Yes, and he’s already been in touch with the police,” Benton says.