“Because of his flashlight, and I had on shorts and was barefoot. So he saw it and made some crack about us being potheads, and that it figured. But I don’t remember any of it.”

“Marino needs to know every word,” I reply. “Please call right away. Find him, and tell him we need to talk.”

CHAPTER 40

I REACH THROUGH GEORGIA’S WINDOW to remove the handheld RFID reader from its charging cradle. Walking over to Cooler number two, I lift the big steel handle, and the huge polished door opens with a quiet suck and a puff of condensation that looks like fog but smells like death.

I move through the chilled foul air inside a huge frigid space filled with steel trays bearing body-shaped mounds, each pouch tagged with a chip embedded in a plastic sticker that should match the chip in the decedent’s yellow wristband. Redundancy. Because one of the worst things you can do is lose someone, and I scan with the reader, holding it like a gun until I locate Molly Hinders.

My breath smokes out as I unzip her pouch, and the sound of blowing air is loud. I grab a pair of gloves from the box on a gurney, and momentarily I’m working my purple-sheathed fingers through her short curly black hair. Everywhere I touch is refrigerated cold as I feel around the sutured autopsy incision that follows her hairline, over her ears and around the back of her head, where I find the small gaping wound in her scalp.

Dr. Lee Wier did exactly what she was trained to do and what I recommended to her when we discussed this case. She made sure to surgically remove the burned tissue so we could have Ernie check it for microscopic particles of metals or other materials that might have been transferred to the wounds. She should have sent these samples to the histology lab days ago, and I walk back out of the cooler. Shutting the heavy door, I hope for a good signal on my phone as I try Paula in the histology lab.

“I finished up everything on that yesterday afternoon,” she says in my earpiece after I ask how the case is coming. “Doctor Wier had asked me to get on it as soon as I could because of the prep time involved, so that’s what I did.”

“She specifically asked you to prepare wet samples for Ernie.”

“Absolutely. I prepped four separate specimens from the burn on the victim’s head.”

“I’m very happy to hear it,” I reply because the burned tissue would have to be dehydrated with acetone before it could be placed inside the vacuum chamber of an electron microscope, and this can take days.