“There are several possible explanations for that,” I said. “One is postmortem purging.”

He narrowed his eyes a little.

“When pressure in the lungs forces bloody fluid from the nose and mouth,” I explained.

“Oh. Generally, that doesn’t happen until the person’s started to decompose, right?”

“Generally.”

“Based on what we know, this lady’s been dead maybe twenty-four hours and it’s cold as a morgue fridge in here.”

“True,” I said. “But if she had her heater running, that in addition to the hot exhaust pouring in would have heated up the inside of the car, and it would have stayed quite warm until the car ran out of gas.”

Marino peered through a window opaque with soot and said, “Looks like the heater’s pushed all the way to hot.”

“Another possibility,” I continued, “is that when she became unconscious, she slumped over, striking her face on the steering wheel, the dash, the seat. Her nose could have bled. She could have bitten her tongue or split her lip. I won’t know until I examine her.”

“Okay, but how about the way she’s dressed?”

Lucero said. “Strike you as unusual that she’d walk out in the cold, come inside a cold garage, hook up the hose, and get into a cold car with nothing but a gown on?”

The pale blue gown was ankle-length, with long sleeves, and made of what looked like a flimsy synthetic material. There is no dress code for people who commit suicide. It would have been logical for Jennifer Deighton to put on coat and shoes before venturing outside on a frigid winter night. But if she had planned to take her life, she would have known she would not feel the cold long.

The ID officer had finished dusting the car doors. I retrieved the chemical thermometer. It was twenty-nine degrees inside the garage.

“When did you get here?” I asked Lucero.

“Maybe an hour and a half ago. Obviously, it was warmer in here before we opened the door, but not much. The garage isn’t heated. Plus, the car hood was cold. I’m guessing the car ran out of gas and the battery went dead a number of hours before we were called.”

Car doors opened and I took a series of photographs before going around to the passenger’s side to look at her head. I braced myself for a spark of awareness, a detail that might ignite some long-buried memory. But there was not the faintest glimmer. I did not know Jennifer Deighton. I had never seen her before in my life.

Her bleached hair was dark at the roots and tightly wound in small pink curlers, several of which had been displaced. She was grossly overweight; though I could tell from her refined features that she may have been quite pretty in a younger, leaner life. I palpated her head and neck and felt no fractures. I placed the back of my hand against her cheek, then struggled to turn her. She was cold and stiff, the side of her face that had been resting against the seat, pale and blistered from the heat. It did not appear that her body had been moved after death, and the skin did not blanch when pressed. She had been dead at least twelve hours.