I try to control my thoughts about the woman I encountered twice today as I brace myself for an inevitability that’s crashing over me like a tidal wave. The bike’s definitely familiar. I didn’t have a reason to study in detail what she was riding but I’m certain there were blue markings on a light-colored or white frame. I remember noticing the blue was the same shade of robin’s-egg blue as the helmet she had on, and my light picks it up again in the grass near a Japanese maple tree.

“That’s just weird,” I say to Marino, and I envision the face of Elisa Vandersteel in the ID I just looked at. “The helmet’s some twenty feet from the body. Why?” I ask.

“It could have happened when she resisted, maybe tried to run from whoever grabbed her,” he proposes, but so far I’m not seeing evidence that she fought anyone or ran anywhere.

“Or did the sisters toss it there, and if so why?” I reply. “And it would seem unlikely that they would remove the victim’s shirt, but where is it? Where are her shoes?”

I don’t mention the phone, bandanna, the necklace or the sunglasses, because I wouldn’t know about them if I’d never seen the woman before. I’m not ready to introduce the subject to Marino. If it’s even remotely possible I’m mistaken about having met the victim earlier, it could launch him in the wrong direction. It could hurt the case in court. I shine the light and comment that the area around the bicycle and the body aren’t very disturbed except for the drag marks.

“I see nothing so far including blood that might indicate there was a pursuit or a struggle,” I’m explaining. “But what I do see isn’t making sense as I continue to point out. It’s chaotic.”

Then my light flicks past what looks like two shiny threads curled on the path inches from each other.

THE SEGMENTS ARE SIX or seven inches long, and I realize what we’ve found is a delicate gold chain that’s been forcibly broken into pieces.

“Possibly part of a necklace,” I say to Marino as I look back at the overturned bicycle.

It’s close by, several yards behind us, and I scan the path around the broken chain, looking for any sign of a confrontation, a struggle. But the tan unpaved surface is smooth and undisturbed as if nothing dramatic happened here.

“A necklace someone ripped off, and it doesn’t look like it’s been out here long.” Marino sets down another tiny evidence marker, a blue cone with the number 7. “I wonder if something was on it, a locket, a cross or whatever that might have looked valuable. Or maybe it was taken as a souvenir.”