I glance up at the long string of headlights moving above us, crossing the river in both directions. I watch aircraft lit up like small planets, clustered around Logan Airport, and I think of Dorothy again. Marino digs in a box of evidence-marking cones in bright primary colors, each of them numbered. He stacks a dozen of them, and it always reminds me of the Cap the Hat board game that my father found at a yard sale in our Miami neighborhood when I was a little kid.

“I said we want a roof,” Marino tells me what he told Harold. “I said we’re going to need the full monty out here.”

CHAPTER 14

WE FOLLOW THE SAME dirt footpath we just drove over, gradually veering off it and into the grass. Dry and several inches deep, it whispers against my shoes and tickles my bare ankles as we watch where we step, moving deeper into the wooded park, toward the hard-packed sandy fitness path that winds through the middle of it.

The tall iron lamps are few and far between. They would offer little more than vague yellowish smudges as you sit on a bench or take a stroll at night. It’s very dark in here, and I have my small tactical light while Marino has his phone flashlight pointed out and slightly down.

In his other hand he tugs the heavy-duty black plastic scene case that’s big enough for a small body. Its wheels make a quiet gritty crunch as he rolls it along, leading the way, both of us careful not to trample evidence or stumble. So far we haven’t seen anything that might make us stop and plant a small colorful cone.

The parched grass is a carpet of brownish-green sharp little blades in the glare of our lights, and my scuffed tan leather shoes are vivid. I can hear fragments of conversation up ahead, what sounds like children talking in excited quiet voices. It’s not a happy excitement but a different brand of cortisol-fueled enthusiasm that I associate with fear, with shock. But there’s something else I’m picking up. The childish sounds don’t strike me as normal.

They bring to mind haunted places with otherworldly conversations that drift on the air in creepy tales. Here, then gone, the laughter of dead children frolicking in the woods, of dead children picking berries and playing hide-and-seek or tag.

The peculiar disembodied voices in the distance ahead remind me of horror movies, and I feel a chill touch the back of my neck as the park spreads out darkly, peacefully, on either side of the fitness path where someone has died. Someone I may have met twice earlier today, and I continue to hope I’m mistaken.