This would have been close to seven P.M., barely an hour ago as the sun was setting. I tell myself if it turns out the victim is the woman I saw, it would be a bizarre twist of fate, an almost unbelievable one. I almost hope the detail about rigor turns out to be accurate. If it is, the victim couldn’t be the young cyclist in Converse sneakers.

But even as I reassure myself, I also know that what Marino said about the rigor can’t be true. Or the reporting officer is confused. Because I don’t think it’s possible—even in this weather—for a dead body on the fitness path inside John F. Kennedy Park not to be discovered for hours. I suspect the death happened recently, and then I envision the young woman’s flushed face and smile again.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I hear her voice in my head.

“I’ve already talked to your office,” Marino says in my earpiece. “Rusty and Harold are bringing a truck.”

“I need a big one.”

“The MCC,” he says, and the tri-axle thirty-five-foot mobile command center is a fine idea if there’s a place to park it.

“We’re going to need a barricade,” I remind Marino, and I can’t get the woman’s face, her sporty sunglasses and self-assured smile, out of my thoughts.

“That’s what I ordered. Remember who you’re talking to.”

When he headed investigations at the CFC, he was in charge of our fleet. In some ways he knows more about the nuts and bolts of our operations than I do.

“I want a place to duck out of the heat and away from the curious,” I reply. “And we’ll need plenty of water.”

“Yeah, there’s not exactly a 7-Eleven handy, and the park is dark as shit. We’re setting up lights.”

“Please don’t turn them on yet. The scene will blaze like Fenway.”

“Don’t worry. We’re keeping everything dark until we’re ready. Doing what we can to keep the gawkers away, especially any assholes trying to film with their phones. There’s student housing everywhere. Eliot House is right there on the other side of Memorial Drive and it’s as big as the Pentagon, plus you got the Kennedy School, and traffic on Memorial Drive. Not to mention the bridge is right there, and across the water is Boston. So we got no plans of lighting up the scene right this minute.”

“Do we have a name?” I ask.