He doesn’t ask me if the shirt looks familiar. He doesn’t come right out and confront me with what I remember about how the cyclist looked or was dressed when I encountered her twice earlier.

“It’s a T-shirt, and it’s wet, apparently covered with vomit,” is what I say. “It would appear to be recent since nothing would stay wet out here for very long.”

As he takes photographs I explain that the shirt is too messy for a paper bag. I’m going to package it in plastic but only temporarily. I’ll have the CFC truck deliver the evidence directly to my headquarters. I’ll make sure everything is properly preserved. We’ll recover any evidence from the shirt and hang it in a drying cabinet—I spell out exactly what we’ll do. Then I cover my nose and mouth with a surgical mask.

“How ’bout you go over and hang out with the two girls,” Marino says to Officer Flanders. “Keep everybody away from them, and don’t ask them nothing. Just stay with them, and the Doc and me will be right there.”

She walks off, and I hand Marino a mask. He puts it on and starts taking photographs.

“Shit,” he complains, and underbrush crackles and snaps beneath his feet as he moves around. “Some things you never get used to. Goddamn it!”

“Are you all right?”

“It’s like when some kid throws up on the bus. Then everybody does.”

“Well don’t unless you’re going to do it in a bag. Would you like one?”

“Hell no. I’ve been around worse shit than this.”

I hand him the pair of disposable forceps and he grips the shirt with them, extracting it from the rhododendron bush. He guides it over the transparent plastic bag I hold open, and I can see at a glance that the T-shirt is from a Sara Bareilles concert and it’s damaged. There are tears in the cotton fabric but I don’t notice blood. If the victim was wearing the shirt when she was attacked or injured, there should be blood on it.

Marino and I discuss this briefly because it doesn’t make sense.

“I’m not getting how her shirt came off.” He continues to poke around in the bushes. “And there’s no blood on it?”

“I need to examine it carefully, which I’m not going to do out here.”

“Unless the girls did it. Maybe they took it off the body because they wanted it.”

“Then why does it have tears in it? Why is it damaged?” I pinch the bag’s seal closed with my fingertips.

“How do we know it wasn’t already torn?” Marino says.