“Not if it were the middle of the day,” I point out as I continue glancing around me, making sure no one can hear. “And if she’s been dead for hours as her alleged rigor would suggest? There would have been eyes and ears because it would have been broad daylight, possibly early or midafternoon.”

“I agree with you. That part can’t be right.”

“It doesn’t sound it. But I’ll see when I get there,” I repeat. “What else can you tell me?”

Marino begins to describe what he knows about a violent death that may have happened within the past hour not even a mile from here. The woman’s body is on the fitness path along the river. Some of her clothing has been ripped off, her helmet more than twenty feet away, and there’s visible blood. It appears she died from a blow to the head, or that’s what the first responding officer told Marino.

“He says you can see where she was struggling, moving around as her head was banged against the path,” Marino adds, but what I alert on is his mention of a helmet. “Like someone was waiting until she was passing through a thick clump of trees where nobody could see, then grabbed her and she fought like hell.”

“What helmet?” I ask. “The victim was on a bicycle?”

“It appears she was attacked while she was riding,” Marino answers, and I can hear his excitement in his tense tone while I feel a chill along my spine.

I can’t help but think of my encounter earlier today, first at the repertory theater and then on the sidewalk along Quincy Street. Suddenly the young woman with the British accent is in my mind, and I wish she weren’t.

“She was on the path that cuts through the middle of the park,” Marino is explaining, “and it happened in the spot where there’s a small clearing in a stand of trees. I’m thinking it was planned like that to ambush her.”

“And her helmet was off and some twenty feet from the body?” It’s another detail that like her rigor defies logic, and I wonder what color the helmet is.

I hope it’s not a robin’s-egg blue.

“That’s the story,” Marino says, and I know exactly what he sounds like when something big goes down.

Not just big. But explosively bad. The blitz attack he’s describing will create a public panic if it’s not handled properly. I feel slightly sick inside. I remember the young woman on her bicycle looking at me quizzically as Benton handed her the bottle of water she dropped. She put her helmet back on before she rode off, and she didn’t bother fastening the chin strap. I remember seeing it dangling as she rode off across the street, through the Yard, heading in the direction of the Square and the river.