“They’re in the first locker.” I’m all business as I explain. “Receipt the packages to Ernie after you’ve left the truck in the evidence bay. He’ll take it from there.”

“I need more details about what happened to it.” Her long dark hair is tied back, her eyes intensely blue beneath her baseball cap as she stares past me into the kitchen.

“I’ve given you the information you need for now.”

“I’m happy to come in and help,” she says. “It must be complicated or you wouldn’t have been here earlier and come back. Marino’s with you?”

“He is?” It’s my way of reminding her that she’s not to interrogate me.

“Hey don’t mess with me cuz I know he’s with you.” She’s teasing seductively, talking fast as if she’s on speed. “I’ve heard his radio chatter. That officer he’s looking for? What’s his name? Hyde as in Doctor Jekyll? Just so you know, it’s on Twitter that Cambridge P.D. is looking for him, that there’s an APB because it appears he’s vanished off the radar and they can’t find his police cruiser. Do you know what happened?”

“I’m not the one listening to radio chatter. You tell me.” I don’t answer her questions, and I don’t like the way she continues looking past me and inching closer to the open door.

“I can finish up in here with Marino so you can get back.” She doesn’t offer but says it like a directive, and I feel my dislike of her intensify.

Jen Garate is pretty in a bad girl way, midthirties with olive skin and a full-bodied figure that she loves to flaunt. When she applied for the job I didn’t give much thought to her tattoos and Gothic jewelry or her snug skimpy clothing, and none of that is my real problem with her. What I have come to object to and resent are her invasiveness and histrionics. Everything she does is motivated by her own brand of exhibitionism. She can be digging up skeletal remains or recovering a dead body from a river and she somehow makes it a sexy spectator sport.

“Please get the truck back as discussed,” I tell her, “and I’ll see you and everyone shortly I hope.”

She lingers on the top step as rain smacks her rain suit, dark blue with forensics in yellow on the back. A sly smile, a smirk creep over her face.

“Sorry to hear about Lucy,” she says and I don’t react.

I play dumb as Marino’s heavy footsteps enter the kitchen.

“What do you mean you’re sorry about her?” I ask Jen calmly, as if there is nothing on earth that might bother me right now.

“Well from the way I hear it the helicopter buzzing her house this morning wasn’t hers.”