I count the silhouettes of the six battery-powered LED spotlights that have been set up on tripods. They’re perched about like tall praying mantises, quiet and dark as if sleeping.

I see the shapes of uniformed cops milling around, talking in the hushed way people do when it’s dark. The sound of childish voices is an indistinct and perplexing staccato in the impenetrable background. I can’t determine the source but it’s eerie, as if the dark wooded area is haunted by agitated sprites.

Marino and I duck under the yellow perimeter tape, which is where I thought it would be. We enter a clearing in the trees where the body is half on the path, and half on the grass. I can make out the paleness of her bare arms and legs, and the whiteness of her sports bra and light color of her shorts. She’s on her back with her legs straight but splayed, her arms up and spread as if she’s been positioned in an X.

What I see sends a mixed message of mockery, of sexual degradation—and also nothing like that. At first glance it seems she’s been displayed to shock whoever discovers her, but it’s unusual that her shorts and bra are still on. Typically when a body is lewdly, hatefully displayed it’s nude. Often other contemptuous touches are inserted and added to further disgrace and disfigure, and I’m not seeing anything like that yet.

But I’ve also learned the hard way to be overly conservative about making assumptions based on previous cases I’ve worked. A detail in one death may mean something else entirely in another. As we get closer I make out that the bicycle is on its side in the middle of the unpaved gritty path. I recognize the tall broad-shouldered Cambridge investigator Tom Barclay off to one side, near the trees, about fifty feet from the body. The spritelike voices I’ve been hearing belong to the two girls he’s with, and they look too young to be out alone at this hour. But it’s hard to tell.

They could be ten or twelve or maybe slightly older, and they’re identical twins, one in pink, the other in yellow. Restless like two plump little birds, they turn their heads in synchrony, their eyes darting about, and it’s obvious there’s something not quite right about them. As we approach I can see that Barclay is shining a light on whatever he’s holding. He’s asking a question I can’t quite hear.

“I might have,” the girl dressed in pink drawls loudly in the voice of one who doesn’t hear very well as she peers at what Barclay is showing the two of them on his phone, and Marino and I get closer.