I print a label for the white plastic ruler I’ll use as a scale, and I take photographs without touching or disturbing anything. Then I reach inside the cabinet and pick up an arrow that’s unlike one I’ve ever seen before. It isn’t functional. I can’t imagine how it can be. What bow could fire a solid copper arrow that weighs as much as a pound? Were it even possible what would be the reason?

I hold it up in my gloved hands and inspect reddish-brown stains on the damaged three-bladed broadhead tip and the elaborately engraved polished shaft. I turn the arrow in my fingertips. The stench is from the fletching, which isn’t made of feathers.

“What the hell?” Marino is about to climb inside anyway and I again tell him no.

“The back of this truck has just become part of a crime scene,” I say to him. “We’re going to have to treat it like that at any rate.”

“What crime scene?” The look on his face is fierce. “Jesus Christ.”

“I don’t know yet,” I reply as I watch it settle over him, one thing turning into another and going from ugly to unthinkable.

“Copperhead.” He repeats the nickname that has stuck in the media, the nickname of a monster we know is Carrie. “Copper bullets. Now a copper arrow.”

The splashing, the constant drumming on the metal roof are very loud and I have to yell when I explain that the arrow’s broadhead tip is a mechanical game point. It expands on contact rather much the way a hollowpoint bullet does. The goal is to inflict catastrophic injuries, to kill quickly, mercifully.

“Except as you well know bow hunting arrows typically are constructed of extremely lightweight carbon fiber,” I add. “The fletching or vanes meant to stabilize the arrow in flight are usually real feathers, occasionally synthetic. But not whatever this bristly material is.”

It’s about an inch long, pale blond and toothbrush-firm as if it’s been varnished. I find a hand lens and a flashlight to get a better look at what could be pieces of a pelt. Not animal but human, and in bright light and magnification I see dirt, fibers and other debris including granules of what looks like black sugar.