HE WAITS TO SEE if I’ll engage in small talk and banter, but I’m not interested. My attention keeps going back to Marino talking to the twins some distance away, angling his phone flashlight in a way that won’t illuminate much to anyone who might be watching with binoculars or a telescopic lens.

But I recognize what he’s doing. He wants to see the expression on the sisters’ faces as he questions them, and I can tell that the girls find him reassuring. I intuit it by the way they gaze up at him. I sense it by how they cluster close to him beneath the dark canopy of a spreading oak tree as if they’re passing through an evil forest and Marino is their guide.

“Anyway,” Barclay says, pointing toward rhododendron bushes about twenty feet ahead of where we are, and to the left of the body. “You might want to be careful where you’re walking around here and I don’t mean because of any evidence we’ve not collected yet. But one of the girls got sick over there.”

“When was that?”

“When I first got here, right as I was walking up. She was coming out of the bushes, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and kind of glassy-eyed. I don’t know which one or if she threw up or what. Trust me, that’s one thing I decided not to investigate too closely.”

“Do you know if either of them touched the body?” I get to the most important question. “What exactly did they tell you they did?” I glance at the time on my phone, and the glow from its display is bright like a TV screen in the dark.

It’s 8:22 P.M., and I make a note of it.

“When I got here there was no one else around, and they weren’t close, were at least twenty feet from her,” Barclay says. “They were real shook up, and they said they didn’t touch it. I must have asked them half a dozen times, and they said no. The closest they got to it was maybe a yard,” he adds, holding his hands about three feet apart as if I can’t envision what he’s describing.

“It?” I ask.

“The dead lady.”

He continues to regard the victim as an object while he treats me like a lesser mortal who has no right to be here. I’ll take it a little longer. Then I’m going to share a few of my thoughts with him. I’m going to give him some free advice.

“They wandered close to check it out, and then retreated, were probably scared shitless,” Barclay says. “They stayed back and called the police.”

The girls have matching backpacks, and I have no idea what might be inside them. But at a glance I don’t see that either of them has a phone.