Carrie has been here. She might be here right now for all we know, and I explain this to Marino as he waits in the downpour, standing there stoically because he has no place else to go unless he sits inside the cab. He won’t. He’ll wait. I feel him watching me cut and fold heavy white paper. He can’t be as certain as I am because he hasn’t seen the videos and doesn’t know about them. But I can imagine his thoughts as I seal my package with red evidence tape that I initial and date. He stares mutely at me with his head bent in the heavy rain. His darkening mood is palpable.

“Are you sure it couldn’t have been in there for a while?” he finally asks. “Maybe from some other case and it got left in there somehow. Or maybe it’s a joke. Someone’s sick joke.”

“You’re not serious.”

“As a heart attack.”

“It’s not from some other case and it’s certainly not a joke. At least not something a normal person would consider a joke.” I dig into my pants pocket for the nitrile-cocooned metamaterial I found on Lucy’s property.

“I’m grasping at straws because I don’t want to believe it,” he says.

“I don’t want to believe it either,” I agree.

“How the hell did it get inside the truck?”

“I don’t know but that’s where it was.”

“And you’re thinking it’s her.”

“What do you think, Marino?”

“Jesus. How the hell could she get inside your truck? Let’s start with that. One thing at a time.”

“Someone put the arrow inside the cabinet to the left of the desk. It’s a fact. It didn’t get there on its own. That’s what I can tell you without reservation.” I label a plastic evidence bag with the time and location of when and where I found the tiny quartz-like hexagon that I tucked inside the finger of a glove.

“What are we talking about? A fucking Houdini?” Marino is angry and foul because he’s unnerved, and his eyes are everywhere, his right hand down by the holstered .40 caliber Glock on his hip.

“My biggest concern is that someone else might be dead.” Gloves and face shield off, and I place my packages inside a steel evidence locker, shut the door and scan my thumb to set the biometric lock. “If the stains and fletching are what I think they are then we have another problem. Where did this biological material come from? Who or what did it come from?”

“Could it be from her?” He means Chanel Gilbert.

“She’s not missing any of her scalp and her hair isn’t short and dyed light blond. If what I’m seeing is human blood and tissue they won’t be hers.”