I have no intention of honoring any sort of schedule ASAC Roger Mahant might decide. But the writing’s on the wall. He’s going to do everything he can to insert himself into the business of the CFC, and I’ll do everything I can to make him wish he hadn’t. For better or worse I can be pretty good at that, and I remind him that when he comes back later to be sure to bring shower supplies and a change of clothing.

“Why?” His dark eyes are in the mirror.

“You’ll want to clean up thoroughly afterward and stuff what you’ve got on in trash bags. I remind you that the odor gets into your hair, your clothing, way up into your sinuses. In fact, I apologize because it’s never a good idea to be inside a closed car after you’ve been working a scene for hours where the body is decomposing rapidly.”

Benton lifts his arms and sniffs his folded-up shirtsleeves. “I think I’m all right but I wasn’t there long or on top of everything like you were,” he plays along with what I’m up to.

Mahant cracks his window an inch, turning the air-conditioning as far up as it will go.

“We have disposable gowns, hair covers, gloves and such that we’ll supply,” I say to him over the blasting air. “And we’re also taking care of food. You’re just not allowed to have anything to eat or drink in the autopsy rooms. But there’s a break area upstairs.”

“Eating in the autopsy rooms? Judas Priest. Do people really do that?”

“Not anymore. When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

“Hell if I know.” Mahant’s reflection in the rearview mirror looks impatient and unhappy.

“What about hepatitis A and B?” I ask that next.

AROUND A BEND IN the river, the Cambridge Forensic Center comes into view up ahead near the Harvard Bridge.

My seven-story metal-skinned cylindrical building has been compared to a lot of things. An unjacketed lead projectile, a dum-dum round, a snub-nosed missile, a pickle. It juts up like a tarnished metal silo across the road from a different section of the same fitness path where Elisa Vandersteel was riding her bicycle when she was killed. The scene I just worked is barely a mile from my office, although one would never know it because Mahant had to take a circuitous route as we left the park unless he wanted to bother flashing his creds and asking police to move barricades from streets closed off.